Lewis Thomas Quotes

103 Sourced Quotes

In evolutionary terms, we have only just arrived.... We cannot trace ourselves back more than a few thousand years before losing sight of what we think of as the real human article... And [we are] vulnerable, error-prone still, at risk of leaving only a thin layer of radioactive fossils.

Lewis Thomas
The essential wildness of science as a manifestation of human behavior is not generally perceived. As we extract new things of value from it, we also keep discovering parts of the activity that seem in need of better control, more efficiency, less unpredictability.

Lewis Thomas
You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn't counted on in other, remote parts.

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

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
There is within medicine, somewhere beneath the pessimism and discouragement resulting from the disarray of the health-care system and its stupendous cost, an undercurrent of almost outrageous optimism about what may lie ahead for the treatment of human disease if we can only keep learning.

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

Lewis Thomas
The whole dear notion of one's own Self-marvelous old free-willed, free- enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self- is a myth.

Lewis Thomas
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.

Lewis Thomas
Taken all in all, the sky is a miraculous achievement. It works, and for what it is designed to accomplish it is as infallible as anything in nature. I doubt whether any of us could think of a way to improve on it, beyond maybe shifting a local cloud from here to there on occasion.

Lewis Thomas
The safest and most prudent of bets to lay money on is surprise. There is a very high probability that whatever astonishes us in biology today will turn out to be useable, and useful, tomorrow.

Lewis Thomas