Lewis Thomas Quotes - Page 6

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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 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• Man is embedded in nature.

  Lewis Thomas

  Nature, Men, Embedded

  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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• If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.

  Lewis Thomas

  Warfare, Weaponry, Ifs

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

  Lewis Thomas

  Mass

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