Lewis Thomas Quotes

• Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Strange, Rock

• 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

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  Tags in Gratification, Exhilaration

• We habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European countryside. But since then we’ve smoked it up and littered it and dumped too much in too many waters. I don’t think it’s our privilege to behave this way.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Meddling, Witness

• We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Heredity, Passing

• We’re as clever as we think we are, but we’ll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We’re at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time – there’s no reason why we can’t do it in other endeavors.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Pool

• Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look – quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, ‘red in tooth and claw.’ That came about because people misread Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest.’

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Amiable, Fittest

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

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Natural, Worrying

• 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

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  Tags in Glimpse, Discovering

• 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 gland. Endorphins. They attach themselves to the cells responsible for feeling pain.

  Lewis Thomas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Body, Agony

• We are not like the social insects. They have only the one way of doing things and they will do it forever, coded for that way. We are coded differently, not just for binary choices, go or no-go. We can go four ways at once, depending on how the air feels: go, no-go, but also maybe, plus what the hell let’s give it a try.

  Lewis Thomas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Differently, Choicest

• 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 each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Enriched, Rented

• We are told that the trouble with modern man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature… In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the Earth is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Surface, Birds

• The dilemma of modern medicine, and the underlying central flaw in medical education and, most of all, in the training of interns, is the irresistible drive to do something, anything. It is expected by patients and too often agreed to by their doctors, in the face of ignorance.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Irresistible, Drive

• The earliest sensation at the onset of illness, often preceding the recognition of identifiable symptoms, is apprehension. Something has gone wrong, and a glimpse of mortality shifts somewhere deep in the mind. It is the most ancient of our fears.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Apprehension, Glimpse

• 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. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.

  Lewis Thomas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Minds, Dangerous

• The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Ignorant, Solid

• The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Talented, Song

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Celestial, Edge

• Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us.

  Lewis Thomas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Startled, Realization

• Our behavior toward each other is the strangest, most unpredictable, and most unaccountable of all the phenomena with which we are obliged to live. In all of nature, there is nothing so threatening to humanity as humanity itself.

  Lewis Thomas

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Unpredictable, Obliged

Lewis Thomas (56)

Birth:	25th November, 1913
Death:	3rd December, 1993
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Administrator, Advisor, Educator, Essayist, Physician, Poet, Researcher

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