Knows Quotes by Lewis Thomas

8 Knows quotes by Lewis Thomas

Thomas’s eight short statements blend scientific curiosity with philosophical depth, providing a compact yet rich look at the nature of understanding.

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The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as…

Lewis Thomas

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

Lewis Thomas

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

Lewis Thomas

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I do not understand modern physics at all, but my colleagues who know a lot about the physics of very small things,…

Lewis Thomas

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Although I usually think I know what I'm going to be writing about, what I'm going to say, most of the time…

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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There's really no such thing as the agony of dying. I'm quite sure that pain is shut off at the moment of…

Lewis Thomas

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The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles,…

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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