Lewis Thomas > Quotes

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

“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

“I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Fragile Species

“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

“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, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency.”
― 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

“My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

“The oldest, easiest to swallow idea was that the earth was man's personal property, a combination of garden, zoo, bank vault, and energy source, placed at our disposal to be consumed, ornamented, or pulled apart as we wished.”
― Lewis Thomas, The 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

“Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be seperate. Do not be a social animal.”
― Lewis Thomas

“Nature abhors a long silence.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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