The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything.… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the… — 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
We're as clever as we think we are, but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
I cannot think of a single field in biology or medicine in which we can claim genuine understanding, and it seems to… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
I don't think that the permanence of the individual human soul is an indispensable part of religious thought. — 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
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
Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
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 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
“Have you noticed how often it happens that a really good idea -- the kind of idea that looks, as it approaches,… — 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
