Lewis Thomas Quotes - Page 5

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• The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled.

  Lewis Thomas

  Cells, Diversity, Lightning

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

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• We pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion.

  Lewis Thomas

  Brain, Mind, Fusion

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

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• We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the most visible and centrally placed of our adversaries. We assume that they must somehow relish what they do.

  Lewis Thomas

  Sleep, Thinking, Disease

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

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• ...the life of the planet began the long, slow process of modulating and regulating the physical conditions of the planet. The oxygen in today's atmosphere is almost entirely the result of photosynthetic living, which had its start with the appearance of blue-green algae among the microorganisms.

  Lewis Thomas

  Life, Science, Blue

  Lewis Thomas (1982). “The Nineteenth Cosmos Club Award, Lewis Thomas, M.D.”

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• We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can postpone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time.

  Lewis Thomas

  Technology, Extra Time, Long

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

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• The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.

  Lewis Thomas

  Ignorant, Pieces, Knows

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• We need science, more and better science, not for its technology, not for leisure, not even for health or longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival.

  Lewis Thomas

  Technology, Survival, Needs

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

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• The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not at all mean, as it is sometimes claimed to mean, a search for mastery over nature.

  Lewis Thomas

  Nature, Mean, Science

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

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• It is a distortion, with something profoundly disloyal about it, to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing, watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces.

  Lewis Thomas

  Health, Pieces, Flapping

  Lewis Thomas (1972*). “Aspects of Biomedical Science Policy”, p.3, National Academies

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• I do not understand modern physics at all, but my colleagues who know a lot about the physics of very small things, like the particles in atoms, or very large things, like the universe, seem to be running into one queerness after another, from puzzle to puzzle.

  Lewis Thomas

  Running, Knowledge, Science

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• Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

  Lewis Thomas

  Mean, Persistence, Survival

  Lewis Thomas (1984). “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony”, Bantam

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• The drive to be useful is encoded in our genes. But when we gather in very large numbers, as in the modern nation-state, we seem capable of levels of folly and self-destruction to be found nowhere else in all of nature. But if we keep at it and keep alive, we are in for one surprise after another. We can build structures for human society never seen before, thoughts never heard before, music never heard before.

  Lewis Thomas

  Persistence, Self, Numbers

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• We have dominated and overruled nature, and from now on the earth is ours, a kitchen garden until we learn to make our own chlorophyll and float it out in the sun inside plastic mebranes. We will build Scarsdale on Mount Everest.

  Lewis Thomas

  Nature, Learning, Science

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• We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of the selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground.

  Lewis Thomas

  Science, Two, Dancing

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

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• We have yet to learn how to retain our humaneness when assembled in masses.

  Lewis Thomas

  Mass

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• Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.

  Lewis Thomas

  Left

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

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• I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they'd be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today's identical twins.

  Lewis Thomas

  Odds, Cells, People

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

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• It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance.

  Lewis Thomas

  Ignorance, Knowledge, Science

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

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• It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.

  Lewis Thomas

  Cells, Resemblance Is, Whales

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• Some of the shrewdest insight into natural processes have been greeted at the outset by the exclamation 'But that's ridiculous'.

  Lewis Thomas

  Dark, Age, Ridiculous

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• Altruism has always been one of biology's deep mysteries. Why should any animal, off on its own, specified and labeled by all sorts of signals as its individual self, choose to give up its life in aid of someone else?

  Lewis Thomas

  Giving Up, Animal, Self

  Lewis Thomas (1984). “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony”, Bantam

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• We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.

  Lewis Thomas

  Dna, Long, Molecules

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

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• The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection.

  Lewis Thomas

  Memories, Thinking, Smell

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• When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.

  Lewis Thomas

  Reading, Mean, Priorities

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• It is my belief, based partly on personal experience but partly also arrived at by looking around at others, that childhood lasts considerably longer in the males of our species than in the females.

  Lewis Thomas

  Childhood, Males, Female

  "The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher" by Lewis Thomas, (p. 236), 1983.

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