All Lewis Thomas Quotes
- The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA. Achievement
- We have dominated and overruled nature, and from now on the earth is ours, a kitchen garden until we learn to make our own chlorophyll… Build
- As a people, we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking… All
- Although I usually think I know what I'm going to be writing about, what I'm going to say, most of the time it doesn't happen… All
- Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like… All
- It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you… Across
- The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along.… Affection
- Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack… Along
- The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life. All
- We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is… Affection
- All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule. All
- We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we… Beings
- I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting. Bach
- Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the… Alive
- If we had better hearing, and could discern the descants of sea birds, the rhythmic tympani of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics… Better
- My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in… Bacteria
- Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends. Friends
- Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else. Alive
- If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner or later, for… All
- I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they'd be almost… Agree