Lewis Thomas Quotes

• 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

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  Tags in Probability, Statistically

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

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Persistence, Economics

• The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not at all mean, as it is sometimes claimed to mean, a search for mastery over nature.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Science, Clearer

• In the fields I know best, among the life sciences, it is required that the most expert and sophisticated minds be capable of changing course – often with a great lurch – every few years.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Expert, Minds

• 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

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  Tags in Picture, Distortion

• It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Observe, Begin

• Most of the time I’ve worked in labs if I didn’t encounter something in a week entirely unexpected and surprising I’d consider it a lost week. Lots of that is due to mistakes and stupidity, but it could open a new line of inquiry. Something really good turns up once in a hundred times, but it makes the whole day worthwhile.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Unexpected, Could

• Much of today’s public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may forever be overlooking the whole by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Apprehension, Preoccupation

• My father was a doctor, and I admired him and got along well with him. He took me with him on house calls. We were living in Flushing, which was then a sleepy village of 25,000 – before the subway got there. I’ve been sure I wanted to be a doctor since I was about 12.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Admired, Subway

• 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

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  Tags in Suspected, Independent

• I don’t think that the permanence of the individual human soul is an indispensable part of religious thought.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Indispensable, Permanence

• 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 pass.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Reincarnated, Rewarding

• I maintain, despite the moment’s evidence against the claim, that we are born and grow up with a fondness for each other, and we have genes for that. We can be talked out of it, for the genetic message is like a distant music, and some of us are hard-of-hearing. Societies are noisy affairs, drowning out the sound of ourselves and our connection.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Noisy, Despite

• I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Fundamentals, Concentrate

• 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 are leading us that way.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Community, Resembling

• If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.

  Lewis Thomas

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  Tags in Destroyed, Warfare

• Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on earth. It is hard to think of a more dependable or enduring occupation, harder still to imagine any future events leading to its extinction.

  Lewis Thomas

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• 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 monstrous progeny. Naked cells, lacking self-respect, do not seem to have any sense of self.

  Lewis Thomas

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• At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.

  Lewis Thomas

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• As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the face of the earth in just a few thousand years, no time at all as evolution clocks time, covering all livable parts of the planet, endangering other forms of life, and now threatening ourselves.

  Lewis Thomas

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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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