“We are endowed with genes which code out our reaction to beavers and otters, maybe our reaction to each other as well.… — 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… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
“Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions. It is time to acknowledge this, perhaps even to learn to… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
The earliest sensation at the onset of illness, often preceding the recognition of identifiable symptoms, is apprehension. Something has gone wrong, and… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
We pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally,… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel… — 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… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
The human mind is not meant to be governed, certainly not by any book of rules yet written; it is supposed to… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
Montaigne simply turns his mind loose and writes whatever he feels like writing. Mostly, he wants to say that reason is not… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
“Goldfish in a glass bowl are harmless to the human mind, maybe even helpful to minds casting about for something, anything, to… — 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
