Lewis Thomas Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Lewis Thomas
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
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 of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done.

Lewis Thomas
We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language... We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a "common goal" of nature as I can guess at. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.

Lewis Thomas
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
There is really no such creature as a single individual; he has no more life of his own than a cast-off cell marooned from the surface of your skin.

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

Lewis Thomas
The dilemma of modern medicine, and the underlying central flaw in medical education and, most of all, in the training of interns, is the irresistible drive to do something, anything. It is expected by patients and too often agreed to by their doctors, in the face of ignorance.

Lewis Thomas
Altruism has always been one of biology's deep mysteries. Why should any animal, off on its own…choose to give up its life in aid of someone else?

Lewis Thomas
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
We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.

Lewis Thomas
Blind alleys and garden paths leading nowhere are the principal hazards in research.

Lewis Thomas
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.

Lewis Thomas
The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.

Lewis Thomas
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
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
The earliest sensation at the onset of illness, often preceding the recognition of identifiable symptoms, is apprehension. Something has gone wrong, and a glimpse of mortality shifts somewhere deep in the mind. It is the most ancient of our fears.

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

Lewis Thomas
I do not agree with this century's fashion of running down the human species as a failed try, a doomed sport. At our worst, we may be going through the early stages of adolescence, and everyone remembers what that is like.

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

Lewis Thomas
Biology needs a better word than "error" for the driving force in evolution. Or maybe "error" will do after all, when you remember that it came from an old root meaning to wander about, looking for something.

Lewis Thomas
You either have science or you don't, and if you have it you are obliged to accept the surprising and disturbing pieces of information, even the overwhelming and upheaving ones, along with the neat and promptly useful bits. It is like that.

Lewis Thomas
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
We are here by the purest chance, and by mistake at that.

Lewis Thomas
The role played by the observer in biological research is complicated but not bizarre: he or she simply observes, describes, interprets, maybe once in a while emits a hoarse shout, but that is that; the act of observing does not alter fundamental aspects of the things observed, or anyway isn't supposed to.

Lewis Thomas
The human mind is not meant to be governed, certainly not by any book of rules yet written; it is supposed to run itself, and we are obliged to follow it along, trying to keep up with it as best we can.

Lewis Thomas
We need science, more and better science, not for its technology, not for leisure, not even for health or longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival.

Lewis Thomas