Lewis Thomas quotes

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

#Mistake #Creativity #Thinking

For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Greed #Heartlessness #Irresponsibility

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

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

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 #Errors

Good applied science in medicine, as in physics, requires a high degree of certainty about the basic facts at hand, and especially about their meaning, and we have not yet reached this point for most of medicine.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Hands #Medicine #Facts

In real life, every field of science is incomplete, and most of them - whatever the record of accomplishment during the last 200 years - are still in their very earliest stages.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Real #Years #Accomplishment

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

#Music #Unique #Play

The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Nature #Dna #Achievement

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 #Thumbs #Use

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

#Life #Gratitude #Sun

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

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 #Sea #Dna

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

#Gnats #Talking #Whales

I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell
-- Lewis Thomas

#Night #Thinking #Cells

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

#Trying #Way #Enchanted

We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Reality #Goes On

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Science #Animal #Survival

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

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Flower #Sunshine #Science

All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Dna #Cells #Molecules

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

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Sarcastic #Sarcasm

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

I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Communication #Technology #People

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

Society evolves not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Unique #Society #Individual

The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance
-- Lewis Thomas

#Ignorance #Discovery #Accomplishment

The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick them in the various spots that tempt you you will discover that they tend to swarm like minnows into sorts of crevices whose existence you hadn't realized and before you know it the whole long sentence becomes immobilized and lashed up squirming in commas. Better to use them sparingly, and with affection, precisely when the need for each one arises, nicely, by itself.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Writing #Long #Important

The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature... It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of twentieth-century science to the human intellect.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Ignorance #Science #Ignorant

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

#Science #Realization #Astonishment

Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Hiking #Climbing #Woods

The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning.
-- Lewis Thomas

#Morning #Doctors #Wife