Lewis Thomas Quotes About Earth

Quotes about: Earth

• 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

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

• 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

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

• 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

  Science, Dna, Cells

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

• 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”

• The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth.

  Lewis Thomas

  Knowledge, Science, Effort

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

• 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”

• I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that.

  Lewis Thomas

  Children, Real, Errors

  Lewis Thomas (1996). “Fragile Species”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

• As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the face of the earth in just a few thousand years, no time at all as evolution clocks time, covering all livable parts of the planet, endangering other forms of life, and now threatening ourselves.

  Lewis Thomas

  Years, Covering, Earth

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

• 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

• 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”

• Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. ... It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun

  Lewis Thomas

  Distance, Moon, Self

  The Lives of a Cell "The World's Biggest Membrane" (1974)

• 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”

• 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

• 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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