“It is not a simple thing to decide where we fit, for at one time or another in our lives we manage… — 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
“Working on a typewriter by touch, like riding a bicycle or strolling on a path, is best done by not giving it… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
We spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
I maintain, despite the moment's evidence against the claim, that we are born and grow up with a fondness for each other,… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were… — 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
We tend to think of our selves as the only wholly unique creations in nature, but it is not so. Uniqueness is… — 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
At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up,… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
“It is in our collective behavior that we are the most mysterious. We won't be able to construct machines like ourselves until… — 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
“Not all social animals are social with the same degree of commitment. In some species, the members are so tied to each… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the… — 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 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
We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
Most of the time I've worked in labs if I didn't encounter something in a week entirely unexpected and surprising I'd consider… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency.” — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at… — 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
