Lewis Thomas Short Quotes

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We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.

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

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

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

Lewis Thomas
What is [the earth] most like?... It is most like a single cell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance...

Lewis Thomas
If you want to use a cliché you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to job it off on anon., or on society.

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

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
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
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 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
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
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
When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.

Lewis Thomas
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.

Lewis Thomas
We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.

Lewis Thomas