Alan Lightman > Quotes

“The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain?”
― Alan Lightman

“A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back. In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time. Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in atime of pain or of joy. The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return. All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return? He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?”
― Alan Lightman, Reunion: A Novel

“Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“Something else gets under your skin, keeps you working days and nights at the sacrifice of your sleeping and eating and attention to your family and friends, something beyond the love of puzzle solving. And that other force is the anticipation of understanding something about the world that no one has ever understood before you.

Einstein wrote that when he first realized that gravity was equivalent to acceleration -- an idea that would underlie his new theory of gravity -- it was the "happiest thought of my life." On projects of far smaller weight, I have experienced that pleasure of discovering something new. It is an exquisite sensation, a feeling of power, a rush of the blood, a sense of living forever. To be the first vessel to hold this new thing.

All of the scientists I've known have at least one more quality in common: they do what they do because they love it, and because they cannot imagine doing anything else. In a sense, this is the real reason a scientist does science. Because the scientist must. Such a compulsion is both blessing and burden. A blessing because the creative life, in any endeavor, is a gift filled with beauty and not given to everyone, a burden because the call is unrelenting and can drown out the rest of life.

This mixed blessing and burden must be why the astrophysicist Chandrasekhar continued working until his mid-80's, why a visitor to Einstein's apartment in Bern found the young physicist rocking his infant with one hand while doing mathematical calculations with the other. This mixed blessing and burden must have been the "sweet hell" that Walt Whitman referred to when he realized at a young age that he was destined to be a poet. "Never more," he wrote, "shall I escape.”
― Alan Lightman

“It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition. A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile...But this happy sensation wears off. After a whil the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.”
― Alan Lightman, Reunion: A Novel

“Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first....
Each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or future, each kiss becomes a kiss of immediacy.”
― Alan Lightman

“Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible decisions will occur. In such a world, how coups one be responsible for his actions? Others hold that each decision must be considered and committed to, that without commitment there is chaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, and sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past effect in the future, but future and past are intertwined.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“But what is the past? Could it be, the firmness of the past is just illusion? Could the past be a kaleidoscope, a pattern of images that shift with each disturbance of a sudden breeze, a laugh, a thought? And if the shift is everywhere, how would we know?”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared. We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“Those of religious faith see time as evidence of god. For surely nothing could be created without a creator. Nothing could be universal and not be divine. All absolutes are part of the One Absolute.”
― Alan Lightman

“On occasion a traveler will venture from one city to another. Is he perplexed What took seconds in Berne might take hours in Fribourg or days in Lucerne. In the time for a leaf to fall in one place a flower could bloom in another. In the duration of a thunderclap in one place two people could fall in love in another. In the time that a boy grows into a man a drop of rain might slide down a windowpane yet the traveler is unaware of these discrepancies...If the pace of human desires stay proportionally the same with the motion of waves on a pond how could the traveler know that something has changed”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“A world with one month is a world of equality.”
― Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

“I've decided that has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.”
― Alan Lightman, Reunion: A Novel

“Well-being and need are purely relative concepts. There is no such thing as poverty in itself, suffering in itself, unhappiness in itself. All is relative.”
― Alan Lightman, Reunion: A Novel

“-But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.”
― Alan Lightman, Mr g: A Novel About The Creation