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”

  43 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”

  48 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”

  68 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

  7 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

  6 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”

  14 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”

  26 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

  16 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

  15 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”

  21 Copy quote

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

  Lewis Thomas

  Life, Gratitude, Earth Day

  17 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”

  25 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”

  7 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”

  25 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

  20 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”

  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".

  57 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

  6 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”

  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”

  17 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”

  15 Copy quote

• A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees; maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway.

  Lewis Thomas

  Next, Location, Sun

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

  7 Copy quote

• Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions.

  Lewis Thomas

  Worry, Spontaneous, Natural

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

  10 Copy quote

• I cannot think of a single field in biology or medicine in which we can claim genuine understanding, and it seems to me the more we learn about living creatures, especially ourselves, the stranger life becomes.

  Lewis Thomas

  Life, Science, Thinking

  13 Copy quote

• At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.

  Lewis Thomas

  Growing Up, Childhood, Luck

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

  12 Copy quote

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