Lewis Thomas Quotes

The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.

Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists ... least human of all creatures.

We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.

We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch.

I have always had a bad memory, as far back as I can remember.

We owe our lives to the sun ... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?

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

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

All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.

Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat is an unscrutable mystery.

It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance ...

It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.

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

Man is embedded in nature.

Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

We have yet to learn how to retain our humaneness when assembled in masses.

Some of the shrewdest insight into natural processes have been greeted at the outset by the exclamation 'But that's ridiculous'.

Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else.

Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions. It is time to acknowledge this, perhaps even to learn to do it better.

We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.

Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development ... the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.

Nature abhors a long silence.

The whole dear notion of one's own Self-marvelous old free-willed, free- enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self- is a myth.

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

We are spectacular splendid manifestations of life. We have language. We have affection. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.

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

Most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning.

If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.

Things are bound to begin happening if you've got your wits about you. You create the lucky accidents.

I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.

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.

If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn't help; best to let it lie there.

Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.

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

I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting.

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

It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.

Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.