Individual Quotes by Lewis Thomas

8 Individual quotes by Lewis Thomas

All Individual quotes Lewis Thomas’s page

These eight short passages provide a quick glimpse of how the physician‑writer reflects on personal identity, blending science and humanity in a succinct way.

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We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over…

Lewis Thomas

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Having long suspected that there was something alive in there, running the place, separate from everything else, absolutely individual and independent, we've…

Lewis Thomas

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Society evolves not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.

Lewis Thomas

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I can say, if I like, that social insects behave like the working parts of an immense central nervous system: the termite…

Lewis Thomas

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I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea urchins, gnats,…

Lewis Thomas

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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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Altruism has always been one of biology's deep mysteries. Why should any animal, off on its own, specified and labeled by all…

Lewis Thomas

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When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him,…

Lewis Thomas

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“We are endowed with genes which code out our reaction to beavers and otters, maybe our reaction to each other as well. We are…

Lewis Thomas

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We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness…

Lewis Thomas

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“It is not a simple thing to decide where we fit, for at one time or another in our lives we manage to organize…

Lewis Thomas

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It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by…

Lewis Thomas

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

Lewis Thomas

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

Lewis Thomas

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I do not agree with this century's fashion of running down the human species as a failed try, a doomed sport. At our worst,…

Lewis Thomas

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It would seem to me... an offense against nature, for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with the curiosity,…

Lewis Thomas

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The drive to be useful is encoded in our genes. But when we gather in very large numbers, as in the modern nation-state, we…

Lewis Thomas

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

Lewis Thomas

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“Nature abhors a long silence.”

Lewis Thomas

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“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most…

Lewis Thomas

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We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature;…

Lewis Thomas

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“The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single…

Lewis Thomas

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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…

Lewis Thomas

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