Lewis Thomas Quotes - Page 5

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• In the fields I know best, among the life sciences, it is required that the most expert and sophisticated minds be capable of changing course - often with a great lurch - every few years.

  Lewis Thomas

  Years, Mind, Experts

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

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• I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known.

  Lewis Thomas

  School, College, Attention

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

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• Given the opportunity, under the right conditions, two cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell, say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and the two nuclei will then fuse as well, and the new hybrid cell will now divide into monstrous progeny. Naked cells, lacking self-respect, do not seem to have any sense of self.

  Lewis Thomas

  Opportunity, Two, Self

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

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• It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on.

  Lewis Thomas

  Hurt, Mean, Science

  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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• 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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• 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 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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• ...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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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