Lewis Thomas Quotes - Page 6

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• It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.

  Lewis Thomas

  Mysterious, Behavior, Collectives

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

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• I can say, if I like, that social insects behave like the working parts of an immense central nervous system: the termite colony is an enormous brain on millions of legs; the individual termite is a mobile neurone.

  Lewis Thomas

  Hard Work, Science, Brain

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

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• Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat is an unscrutable mystery.

  Lewis Thomas

  Cat, Animal, Mind

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

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• Man is embedded in nature.

  Lewis Thomas

  Nature, Men, Embedded

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

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• Most of the time I've worked in labs if I didn't encounter something in a week entirely unexpected and surprising I'd consider it a lost week. Lots of that is due to mistakes and stupidity, but it could open a new line of inquiry. Something really good turns up once in a hundred times, but it makes the whole day worthwhile.

  Lewis Thomas

  Mistake, Stupidity, Encounters

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• If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner or later, for better or worse, as it is in our nature to do.

  Lewis Thomas

  Technology, Use, Century

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

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• Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else.

  Lewis Thomas

  Alive, Thanks

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

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• We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an exhilaration, to recognize that we have such a distance still to go.

  Lewis Thomas

  Distance, Years, Satisfaction

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

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• Most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning.

  Lewis Thomas

  Morning, Get Better, Facts

  Lewis Thomas (1972*). “Aspects of Biomedical Science Policy”, p.4, National Academies

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• I do not agree with this century's fashion of running down the human species as a failed try, a doomed sport. At our worst, we may be going through the early stages of adolescence, and everyone remembers what that is like.

  Lewis Thomas

  Sports, Running, Fashion

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

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• The literature has become too vast to comprehend...It is...difficult to grasp even for workers in closely neighboring fields. ...There is much more reliance on word of mouth for the transmission of scientific data...gossip.

  Lewis Thomas

  Dark, Data, Gossip

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• Maybe there is a single spot, just one, where living organisms are holed up. Maybe so, but if so this would be the strangest thing of all, absolutely incomprehensible. For we are not familiar with this kind of living. We do not have solitary, isolated creatures. It is beyond our imagination to conceive of a single form of life that exists alone and independent, unattached to other forms.

  Lewis Thomas

  Independent, Imagination, Would Be

  "The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher" by Lewis Thomas, (p. 13), 1979.

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• Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development... the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.

  Lewis Thomas

  Development, Stage, Juvenile

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• The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. To be sure, it is hidden away in bone and conducts internal affairs in secrecy, but virtually all the business is the direct result of thinking that has already occurred in other minds.

  Lewis Thomas

  Thinking, Brain, Mind

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

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• It is not a simple life to be a single cell, although I have no right to say so, having been a single cell so long ago myself that I have no memory at all of that stage of my life.

  Lewis Thomas

  Memories, Science, Simple

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

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• Although I usually think I know what I'm going to be writing about, what I'm going to say, most of the time it doesn't happen that way at all. At some point I get misled down a garden path, I get surprised by an idea that I hadn't anticipated getting, which is a little bit like being in a laboratory.

  Lewis Thomas

  Writing, Garden, Thinking

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