Lewis Thomas Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

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

Lewis Thomas
It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in science, awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code.

Lewis Thomas
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.

Lewis Thomas
We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an exhilaration, to recognize that we have such a distance still to go.

Lewis Thomas
Science began by fumbling. It works because the people involved in it work, and work together. They become excited and exasperated, they exchange their bits of information at a full shout, and, the most wonderful thing of all, they keep at one another.

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

Lewis Thomas
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
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
It is a distortion, with something profoundly disloyal about it, to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing, watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces.

Lewis Thomas
Given any new technology for transmitting information, we seem bound to use it for great quantities of small talk. We are only saved by music from being overwhelmed by nonsense.

Lewis Thomas
The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection.

Lewis Thomas
Our arsenals for fighting off bacteria are so powerful and involve so many defense mechanisms, that we are more in danger from these than from the invaders. We live in the midst of explosive devices. We are mined.

Lewis Thomas
When you consider the size of an individual termite, photographed standing alongside his nest, he ranks with the New Yorker and shows a better sense of organization than a resident of Los Angeles.

Lewis Thomas