quotes by 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 (Lives of a Cell, The)

"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. "
— Lewis Thomas

"Have you noticed how often it happens that a really good idea -- the kind of idea that looks, as it approaches, like the explanation for everything about everything -- tends to hover near at hand when you are thinking hard about something quite different? There you are, halfway into a taxi, thinking about the condition of the cartilage in the right knee joint, and suddenly, with a whirring sound, in flies a new notion looking for a place to light. You'd better be sure you have a few bare spots, denuded of anything like thought, ready for its perching, or it will fly away into the dark."
— Lewis Thomas (The Youngest Science)

"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

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

"The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance"
— Lewis Thomas

"If we had better hearing, and could discern the descants of sea birds, the rhythmic tympani of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet."
— Lewis Thomas (Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher)

"It is not a simple life to be a single cell, although I have no right to say so, having been a single cell so long ago myself that I have no memory at all of that stage in my life."
— Lewis Thomas (The Youngest Science)