A Quote by Alan Lightman

In our constant search for meaning in this baffling and temporary existence, trapped as we are within our three pounds of neurons, it is sometimes hard to tell what is real. We often invent what isn't there. Or ignore what is. We try to impose order, both in our minds and in our conceptions of external reality. We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.

Alan Lightman

Quote Topics

Baffling Both Connect Constant Dream Existence External Find Hard Haunted Hope Ignore Impose Invent Meaning Minds Neurons Often Only Order Our Piece Pounds Real Reality Search Search For Meaning See Sometimes Suspicion Tell Temporary Three Tiny Trapped Truth Try Underneath Understand Whole Within World

Quote Author

Alan Lightman
American - Physicist
Born: November 28, 1948

Many of us are slaves to our minds. Our own mind is our worst enemy. We try to focus, and our mind wanders off. We try to keep stress at bay, but anxiety keeps us awake at night. We try to be good to the people we love, but then we forget them and put ourselves first.

Sakyong Mipham

I hope what I do when I draw from other people's lives is pay tribute. To try to understand what it means in our society to be silenced. To try to understand how class and gender intersect with that. To try to understand how being named and classified within the context of psychiatry can intersect with all that, as well.

Kate Zambreno

Myths are stories for our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to live and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.

Joseph Campbell

Saying “I'll try” means our soul isn't really in it. We tell ourselves “I'll try” when our inflated egos won't come clean and admit that we're actually not all that determined. We can't overcome obstacles with the words “I'll try.” As Yoda, the philosopher in the Star Wars movies, says, “Do, or do not. There is no 'try.

Chris Powell

The very shape of our dreams defines us. We learn about the world and try out our thoughts and visions in them. Our dreams goad us and drive us and summon and sustain us and when we are old they comfort us. Magic is a kind of dream, and love is a dream, and hope is a dream. Without our dreams, there is no sweetness, no purpose to life.

Isobelle Carmody

Today, when we look at a brain, we see an intricate network of billions of neurons in constant, crackling communication, a chemical labyrinth that senses the world outside and within, produces love and sorrow, keeps our hearts beating and lungs breathing, composes our thoughts, and constructs our consciousness.

Carl Zimmer

Our world does not exist from its own side--like a dream world, it is a mere appearance to our mind. In dreams we can see and touch our dream world, but when we wake up we realize that it is simply a projection of our mind and had no existence outside our mind. In the same way, the world we see when we are awake is simply a projection of our mind and has no existence outside our mind.

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

There are two main strategies we can try to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Our philosophy is always to search for the best quality. That is something our father taught us. It's one way to be different from your competitors. You can try to be cheaper, or you can try to be better.

Pier Luigi Loro Piana

Every person must live the inner life in one form or another. Consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or involuntarily, the inner world will claim us and exact its dues. If we go to that realm consciously, it is by our inner work: our prayers, meditations, dream work, ceremonies, and Active Imagination. If we try to ignore the inner world, as most of us do, the unconscious will find its way into our lives through pathology: our psychosomatic symptoms, compulsions, depressions, and neuroses.

Robert A. Johnson

There are only shades of gray. Black and white are nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we try to judge things, and map out our place in the world in relevance to them. Good and evil, in their purest form, are as intangible and forever beyond our ability to hold in our hand as any Fae illusion. We can only aim at them, aspire to them, and hope not to get so lost in the shadows that we can no longer aim for the light.

Karen Marie Moning

This is life. Our bodies change. Our minds change. Our hearts change. Things are always evolving. I hope we can be supportive of each other and try to really have each other's backs, especially when we don't know the whole story.

Emma Stone

Constant reminding ourselves that we not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions.

David Eagleman

One of the most effective ways to overcome anxiety is to try to shift the focus of attention away from self and toward others. When we succeed in this, we find that the scale of our own problems diminishes. This is not to say we should ignore our own needs altogether, but rather that we should try to remember others' needs alongside our own, no matter how pressing ours may be

Dalai Lama

We play sometimes against teams with more individual quality than us, better players, bigger budgets, whatever, but we try to play our football. We don't try to change too much in our philosophy, in our model.

Marco Silva

If we try to listen we find it extraordinarily difficult, because we are always projecting our opinions and ideas, our prejudices, our background, our inclinations, our impulses; when they dominate, we hardly listen at all to what is being said...One listens and therefore learns, only in a state of silence, in which this whole background is in abeyance, is quite; then, it seems to me, it is possible to communicate

Jiddu Krishnamurti

A Quote by Alan Lightman

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors