Alan Lightman Quotes, Spiritual Quotes, Appreciation Quotes

For me, spirituality includes the belief in things larger than ourselves, an appreciation of nature and beauty, a sensitivity to the world, a feeling of shared connection with other living things, a desire to help people less fortunate than ourselves. All of these things can occur with or without God. I do not believe in the existence of God, but I consider myself a spiritual person in the manner I have just described. I call myself a spiritual atheist. I would imagine that many people are spiritual atheists.

5 years ago

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Spiritual Quotes , Appreciation Quotes

No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Imagination Quotes , God Exists Quotes

Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn't care one whit about us. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Oneness Quotes , Earthquakes Quotes

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Writing Quotes , Class Quotes

Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Past Quotes , Night Quotes

I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Moving Quotes , Wrestling Quotes

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].

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Past Quotes , Men Quotes

You say, "Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse." And that's enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Book Quotes , Years Quotes

I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Writing Quotes , Our World Quotes

Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I've mentioned, of course, are original, but it's important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world. And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can't really depend upon what you've done with previous books.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Book Quotes , Important Quotes

It's exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that. That's an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Country Quotes , Emotional Quotes

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?

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Past Quotes , Laughing Quotes

Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.

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Everyone shares the same fate.

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In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Time Quotes , Kissing Quotes

I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I'd like to use my time more carefully.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Morning Quotes , Use Quotes

Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Character Quotes , Writing Quotes

I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration. A book, especially a longer book, it's a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It's a vision of the whole thing.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Book Quotes , Inspiration Quotes

You've made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Feelings Quotes , Harmony Quotes

I've taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it's a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.

5 years ago

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Tags : Alan Lightman Quotes , Communication Quotes , Philosophical Quotes