Lewis Thomas Quotes - Page 4

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• The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.

  Lewis Thomas

  Past, Agency, Interesting

  "The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher". Book by Lewis Thomas, 1974.

  7 Copy quote

• 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 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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• Our behavior toward each other is the strangest, most unpredictable, and most unaccountable of all the phenomena with which we are obliged to live. In all of nature, there is nothing so threatening to humanity as humanity itself.

  Lewis Thomas

  Humanity, Threatening, Behavior

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

  7 Copy quote

• Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on earth. It is hard to think of a more dependable or enduring occupation, harder still to imagine any future events leading to its extinction.

  Lewis Thomas

  Thinking, Doctors, Practice

  Lewis Thomas (1996). “Fragile Species”, p.7, Simon and Schuster

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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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• 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”

  13 Copy quote

• 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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• The dilemma of modern medicine, and the underlying central flaw in medical education and, most of all, in the training of interns, is the irresistible drive to do something, anything. It is expected by patients and too often agreed to by their doctors, in the face of ignorance.

  Lewis Thomas

  Ignorance, Medicine, Doctors

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• It would seem to me... an offense against nature, for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with the curiosity, filled to overbrimming as we are with questions, and naturally talented as we are for the asking of clear questions, and then for us to do nothing about, or worse, to try to suppress the questions.

  Lewis Thomas

  Science, Curiosity, Trying

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

  8 Copy quote

• Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dry as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming, membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos.

  Lewis Thomas

  Distance, Moon, Blue

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

  4 Copy quote

• Ants are more like the parts of an animal than entities on their own. They are mobile cells, circulating through a dense connective tissue of other ants in a matrix of twigs. The circuits are so intimately interwoven that the anthill meets all the essential criteria of an organism.

  Lewis Thomas

  Animal, Cells, Essentials

  "The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher". Book by Lewis Thomas, 1974.

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• Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.

  Lewis Thomas

  Science, Waste, Chemicals

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• If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.

  Lewis Thomas

  Responsibility, Reality, Trying

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

  7 Copy quote

• It is when physicians are bogged down by their incomplete technologies, by the innumerable things they are obliged to do in medicine when they lack a clear understanding of disease mechanisms, that the deficiencies of the health-care system are most conspicuous. If I were a policy-maker, interested in saving money for health care over the long haul, I would regard it as an act of high prudence to give high priority to a lot more basic research in biologic science.

  Lewis Thomas

  Technology, Medicine, Long

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

  4 Copy quote

• Of all celestial bodies within reach or view, as far as we can see, out to the edge, the most wonderful and marvellous and mysterious is turning out to be our own planet earth. There is nothing to match it anywhere, not yet anyway.

  Lewis Thomas

  Views, Body, Earth

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

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• The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

  Lewis Thomas

  Hands, Matter, Language

  "A Long Line of Cells: Collected Essays".

  7 Copy quote

• Animals, even plants, lie to each other all the time, and we could restrict the research to them, putting off the real truth about ourselves for the several centuries we need to catch our breath. What is it that enables certain flowers to resemble nubile insects, or opossums to play dead, or female fireflies to change the code of their flashes in order to attract, and then eat, males of a different species?

  Lewis Thomas

  Truth, Lying, Real

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

  7 Copy quote

• The human mind is not meant to be governed, certainly not by any book of rules yet written; it is supposed to run itself, and we are obliged to follow it along, trying to keep up with it as best we can.

  Lewis Thomas

  Running, Book, Mind

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

  4 Copy quote

• Montaigne simply turns his mind loose and writes whatever he feels like writing. Mostly, he wants to say that reason is not a special, unique gift of human beings, marking us off from the rest of nature.

  Lewis Thomas

  Nature, Writing, Science

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• We habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European countryside. But since then we've smoked it up and littered it and dumped too much in too many waters. I don't think it's our privilege to behave this way.

  Lewis Thomas

  Thinking, Water, Privilege

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• I don't think that the permanence of the individual human soul is an indispensable part of religious thought.

  Lewis Thomas

  Religious, Thinking, Soul

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• It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn't get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.

  Lewis Thomas

  Moving, Writing, Feelings

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

  7 Copy quote

• We are told that the trouble with modern man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature... In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the Earth is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds.

  Lewis Thomas

  Country, Men, Bird

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  10 Copy quote

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