Lewis Thomas Quotes - Page 3

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• 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

  Science, Hands, Medicine

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• Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, 'red in tooth and claw.' That came about because people misread Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.'

  Lewis Thomas

  Views, People, Survival

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• We are spectacular splendid manifestations of life. We have language. We have affection. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.

  Lewis Thomas

  Affection, Language, Splendid

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• I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.

  Lewis Thomas

  Mind, Goes On, Ants

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

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• We spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function; it is what we do with our lives.

  Lewis Thomas

  Communication, Talking, Trying

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

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• I don't want to be reincarnated, that's for sure. When you've had rewarding experiences in your life - a loving family, friends - you don't need additional reassurances that you're going to do something with a new cast of characters. I'd just as soon pass.

  Lewis Thomas

  Character, Needs, Want

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• 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

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

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• Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.

  Lewis Thomas

  Inspirational, Dance, New York

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• It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.

  Lewis Thomas

  Real, Learning, Aesthetic

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• Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.

  Lewis Thomas

  Art, Philosophy, History

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

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• We're as clever as we think we are, but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors.

  Lewis Thomas

  Clever, Thinking, Numbers

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• Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!

  Lewis Thomas

  Children, Writing, Jumping

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

  16 Copy quote

• I have always had a bad memory, as far back as I can remember.

  Lewis Thomas

  Memories, Remember, Bad Memories

  "The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher" by Lewis Thomas, (p. 1), 1983.

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• On any Tuesday morning, if asked, a good working scientist will tell you with some self-satisfaction that the affairs of his field are nicely in order, that things are finally looking clear and making sense, and all is well. But come back again on another Tuesday, and the roof may have just fallen in on his life's work.

  Lewis Thomas

  Morning, Self, Order

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• The greatest achievements in the science of this [twentieth] century are themselves the sources of more puzzlement than human beings have ever experienced. Indeed, it is likely that the twentieth century will be looked back at as the time when science provided the first close glimpse of the profundity of human ignorance. We have not reached solutions; we have only begun to discover how to ask questions.

  Lewis Thomas

  Ignorance, Science, Achievement

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• We are educated to be amazed by the infinite variety of life forms in nature. We are, I believe, only at the beginning of being flabbergasted by its unity.

  Lewis Thomas

  Inspirational, Nature, Educational

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• 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

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• The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance

  Lewis Thomas

  Ignorance, Discovery, Accomplishment

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• I maintain, despite the moment's evidence against the claim, that we are born and grow up with a fondness for each other, and we have genes for that. We can be talked out of it, for the genetic message is like a distant music, and some of us are hard-of-hearing. Societies are noisy affairs, drowning out the sound of ourselves and our connection.

  Lewis Thomas

  Growing Up, Hearing, Messages

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

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• 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

  Truth, Ignorance, Science

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

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• Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists . . . least human of all creatures.

  Lewis Thomas

  Cat, Scientist, Rebuke

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• 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

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

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• 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”

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• Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat is an unscrutable mystery.

  Lewis Thomas

  Cat, Animal, Mind

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

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• The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.

  Lewis Thomas

  Past, Agency, Interesting

  "The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher". Book by Lewis Thomas, 1974.

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