Lewis Thomas Quotes

It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting.

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.

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

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.

At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.

Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions.

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

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

If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn't help; best to let it lie there.

The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.

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.

It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on.

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

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

We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.

If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.

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.

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

Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.

The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not at all mean, as it is sometimes claimed to mean, a search for mastery over nature.

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

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

Things are bound to begin happening if you've got your wits about you. You create the lucky accidents.

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

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

I don't think that the permanence of the individual human soul is an indispensable part of religious thought.

Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.

It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.

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

Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development... the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.

Man is embedded in nature.

We pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion.

Some of the shrewdest insight into natural processes have been greeted at the outset by the exclamation 'But that's ridiculous'.

It is my belief, based partly on personal experience but partly also arrived at by looking around at others, that childhood lasts considerably longer in the males of our species than in the females.

In the fields I know best, among the life sciences, it is required that the most expert and sophisticated minds be capable of changing course - often with a great lurch - every few years.

The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.

Most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning.

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

Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else.

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.

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.