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Stills Quotes by Lewis Thomas

8 Stills quotes by Lewis Thomas

All Stills quotes Lewis Thomas’s page

Thomas brings his scientific curiosity to Stills in just eight lines, each a compact blend of wonder and wit. The set is small, but it captures his habit of turning everyday moments into thoughtful musings, offering a quick taste of his reflective voice.

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The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and…

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We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the…

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As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the…

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We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language…

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I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a…

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Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on…

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In real life, every field of science is incomplete, and most of them - whatever the record of accomplishment during the last…

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As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at…

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More by Lewis Thomas

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

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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…

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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…

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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…

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

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

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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,…

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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,…

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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…

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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.

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“Nature abhors a long silence.”

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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…

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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;…

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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…

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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…

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