“Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature.… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not at… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
“The oldest, easiest to swallow idea was that the earth was man's personal property, a combination of garden, zoo, bank vault, and… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
We habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles,… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn't help; best to let it lie there. — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting. — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
