Quotes by Lewis Thomas

About Lewis Thomas:

Lewis Thomas was an American physician, poet, etymologist, essayist, administrator, educator, policy advisor, and researcher.
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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

Of all celestial bodies within reach or view, as far as we can see, out to the edge, the most wonderful and marvellous and mysterious is turning out to be our own planet earth. There is nothing to match it anywhere, not yet anyway.

Lewis Thomas

We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of eac...

Lewis Thomas

Given the opportunity, under the right conditions, two cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell, say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and the two nuclei will then fuse as well, and the new hybrid cell will now divide into monstr...

Lewis Thomas

Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

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

Having long suspected that there was something alive in there, running the place, separate from everything else, absolutely individual and independent, we've celebrated by giving it a real name. My self.

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

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

Lewis Thomas

We are, perhaps uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take the idea of dying, unable to sit still.

Lewis Thomas

As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can ...

Lewis Thomas

Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that the mere fact of our existence should keep us all in a state of contented dazzlement.

Lewis Thomas

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

Lewis Thomas

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.

Lewis Thomas

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. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by...

Lewis Thomas

I don't want to be reincarnated, that's for sure. When you've had rewarding experiences in your life - a loving family, friends - you don't need additional reassurances that you're going to do something with a new cast of characters. I'd just as soon...

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

Very few recognize science as the high adventure it really is, the wildest of all explorations ever taken by human beings, the chance to glimpse things never seen before, the shrewdest maneuver for discovering how the world works.

Lewis Thomas

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

Lewis Thomas

I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology ...

Lewis Thomas

There's really no such thing as the agony of dying. I'm quite sure that pain is shut off at the moment of death. You see, something happens when the body knows it's about to go. Peptide hormones are released by cells in the hypothalamus and pituitary...

Lewis Thomas

Author Bio

  • NameLewis Thomas
  • DescriptionAmerican physician, poet and educator
  • BornNovember 25, 1913
  • DiedDecember 3, 1993
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPhysician; Writer; Naturalist
  • AwardsNational Book Award