Lewis Thomas Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Lewis Thomas on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.