Lewis Thomas Quotes

Quotes about:

• Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.

  Lewis Thomas

  Thinking, Facts, Surprise

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  45 Copy quote

• Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack for being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as often as the right ones. We get along in life this way.

  Lewis Thomas

  Life, Mistake, Creativity

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  49 Copy quote

• The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.

  Lewis Thomas

  Real, Science, Dna

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  70 Copy quote

• Science will...produce the data..., but never the
  full meaning. For perceiving real significance, we
  shall need...most of all the brains of poets, [and]
  also those of artists, musicians, philosophers,
  historians, writers in general.

  Lewis Thomas

  Real, Artist, Data

  8 Copy quote

• Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.

  Lewis Thomas

  Learning, Science, Realization

  8 Copy quote

• It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by the act of learning all the way.

  Lewis Thomas

  Science, Understanding, Trying

  17 Copy quote

• As a people, we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body.

  Lewis Thomas

  Health, People, Dying

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  22 Copy quote

• We do not understand much of anything, from... the "big bang" , all the way down to the particles in the atoms of a bacterial cell. We have a wilderness of mystery to make our way through in the centuries ahead.

  Lewis Thomas

  Science, Cells, Bangs

  7 Copy quote

• We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.

  Lewis Thomas

  Life, Death, Fear

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  29 Copy quote

• We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch.

  Lewis Thomas

  Reality, Goes On

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  16 Copy quote

• The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.

  Lewis Thomas

  Song, Hands, People

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  6 Copy quote

• We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?

  Lewis Thomas

  Life, Gratitude, Earth Day

  20 Copy quote

• I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting.

  Lewis Thomas

  Space, Musical, Would Be

  18 Copy quote

• We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.

  Lewis Thomas

  Change, Music, Unique

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  28 Copy quote

• If we had better hearing, and could discern the descants of sea birds, the rhythmic tympani of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.

  Lewis Thomas

  School, Sea, Feet

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  27 Copy quote

• As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up.

  Lewis Thomas

  Growing Up, Learning, Science

  21 Copy quote

• If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn't help; best to let it lie there.

  Lewis Thomas

  Lying, Moving, Ideas

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  8 Copy quote

• Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

  Lewis Thomas

  Music, Effort, Brain

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  8 Copy quote

• I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that.

  Lewis Thomas

  Children, Real, Errors

  Lewis Thomas (1996). “Fragile Species”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

• Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves... They do everything but watch television.

  Lewis Thomas

  Children, War, Army

  "A Long Line of Cells: Collected Essays".

  59 Copy quote

• The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.

  Lewis Thomas

  Rest Of Life, Language, Mark

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  8 Copy quote

• I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others.

  Lewis Thomas

  Knowledge, Science, Talking

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  16 Copy quote

• The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning.

  Lewis Thomas

  Morning, Doctors, Wife

  7 Copy quote

• We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.

  Lewis Thomas

  Party, Dna, Sea

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  19 Copy quote

• I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell

  Lewis Thomas

  Night, Thinking, Cells

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  13 Copy quote

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