Lewis Thomas Quotes

132 quotes in 2267 categories

• When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity....…
• Animals, even plants, lie to each other all the time, and we could restrict the research to them, putting off the real truth about ourselves…
• The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. To be sure,…
• I cannot think of a single field in biology or medicine in which we can claim genuine understanding, and it seems to me the more…
• Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat is an unscrutable…
• I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates,…
• I do not understand modern physics at all, but my colleagues who know a lot about the physics of very small things, like the particles…
• It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by the…
• The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our…
• It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than…
• It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance...
• Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.
• Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.
• The body of science is not, as it is sometimes thought, a huge coherent mass of facts, neatly arranged in sequence, each one attached to…
• The greatest achievements in the science of this [twentieth] century are themselves the sources of more puzzlement than human beings have ever experienced. Indeed, it…
• ...the life of the planet began the long, slow process of modulating and regulating the physical conditions of the planet. The oxygen in today's atmosphere…
• We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?
• Good applied science in medicine, as in physics, requires a high degree of certainty about the basic facts at hand, and especially about their meaning,…
• Montaigne simply turns his mind loose and writes whatever he feels like writing. Mostly, he wants to say that reason is not a special, unique…
• We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways…

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