Top 120 Alan Lightman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?”

— Alan Lightman

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Alan Lightman

55. “We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways. To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.”

— Alan Lightman

56. “And I think of the night-blooming cereus, a plant that looks like a leathery weed most of the year. But for one night each summer its flower opens to reveal silky white petals, which encircle yellow lacelike threads, and another whole flower like a tiny sea anemone within the outer flower. By morning, the flower has shriveled. One night of the year, as delicate and fleeting as a life in the universe.”

— Alan Lightman

57. “Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.”

— Alan Lightman

58. “No one ever expects poetry to sell.”

— Alan Lightman

59. “A world with one month is a world of equality.”

— Alan Lightman

60. “I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.”

— Alan Lightman

61. “It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country...”

— Alan Lightman

62. “In a world of shifting past, these memories are wheat in wind, fleet in dreams, shapes in clouds. Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened.”

— Alan Lightman

63. “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.”

— Alan Lightman

64. “Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing. To the point that I have to be careful that they don’t take over.”

— Alan Lightman

65. “In time, there are an infinity of worlds.”

— Alan Lightman

66. “Novels aren’t pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it’s a good starting place for me.”

— Alan Lightman

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

— Alan Lightman

68. “I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.”

— Alan Lightman

69. “Unfortunately, public debates do not have much room for subtlety. The audience wants a quick thrust at your opponent, not a slow and convoluted series of moves. Whenever Obama uses subtleties in discussing a complex issue, he gets creamed.”

— Alan Lightman

70. “I wouldn’t overall say that The Diagnosis it’s a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It’s a modern tragedy.”

— Alan Lightman

71. “The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.”

— Alan Lightman

72. “At the beginning of each session, one of us will begin talking about some random idea, another person will chime in or change the subject, and miraculously, after twenty minutes, we find that we have zeroed in on a question that everyone is passionate about. What continues to astonish me is the frequency with which religion slips into the room, unbidden but persistent.”

— Alan Lightman

73. “As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.”

— Alan Lightman

74. “Without downtime, we might not physically die, but we will die psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. In downtime, not only are we making sense of the events of the day, we are making sense of our lives. We are combing through the thousands of hours and days of our lives to find those experiences and thoughts that have personal meaning to us, that speak to us, sometimes in that quiet, whispering voice.”

— Alan Lightman

75. “I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film. Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.”

— Alan Lightman

76. “The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life.”

— Alan Lightman

77. “A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel. Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.”

— Alan Lightman

78. “Einstein once wrote, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”

— Alan Lightman

79. “They have been trapped by their own inventiveness and audacity. And they must pay with their lives.”

— Alan Lightman

80. “The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.”

— Alan Lightman

81. “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 while 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

82. “If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.”

— Alan Lightman

83. “In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they’re rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?”

— Alan Lightman

84. “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.”

— Alan Lightman

85. “Thus, in this world of brief scenes from the future, few risks are taken. Those who have seen the future do not need to take risks, and those who have not yet seen the future wait for their visions without taking risks.”

— Alan Lightman

86. “I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It’s a challenge to the powers that be. It’s saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.”

— Alan Lightman

87. “I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.”

— Alan Lightman

88. “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.”

— Alan Lightman

89. “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.”

— Alan Lightman

90. “If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.”

— Alan Lightman

91. “I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science. All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.”

— Alan Lightman

92. “In a world where time is a sense, like sight or like taste, a sequence of episodes may be quick or may be slow, dim or intense, salty or sweet, causal or without cause, orderly or random, depending on the prior history of the viewer.”

— Alan Lightman

93. “Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.”

— Alan Lightman

94. “Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.”

— Alan Lightman

95. “Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.”

— Alan Lightman

96. “It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.”

— Alan Lightman

97. “I should have written books instead of reading them.”

— Alan Lightman

98. “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.”

— Alan Lightman

99. “What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?”

— Alan Lightman

100. “Continents of memory had been lost.”

— Alan Lightman