Lewis Thomas Quotes - Page 6

Quotes about:

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

  Lewis Thomas

  Mean, Persistence, Survival

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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.

  Lewis Thomas

  Reading, Mean, Priorities

  7 Copy quote

• 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”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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”

  4 Copy quote

• The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled.

  Lewis Thomas

  Cells, Diversity, Lightning

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

  7 Copy quote

• Man is embedded in nature.

  Lewis Thomas

  Nature, Men, Embedded

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

  4 Copy quote

• ...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.”

  25 Copy quote

• 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”

  4 Copy quote

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

  Lewis Thomas

  Warfare, Weaponry, Ifs

  4 Copy quote

• I do not understand modern physics at all, but my colleagues who know a lot about the physics of very small things, like the particles in atoms, or very large things, like the universe, seem to be running into one queerness after another, from puzzle to puzzle.

  Lewis Thomas

  Running, Knowledge, Science

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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”

  4 Copy quote

Page 6 of 6

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

6

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin