All Lewis Thomas Quotes
- 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
- It is my belief, based partly on personal experience but partly also arrived at by looking around at others, that childhood lasts considerably longer in… Arrived
- Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. ... It has the… Alive
- The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going… Act
- We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it… Certain
- 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, we… Adolescence
- We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA. Dna
- The literature has become too vast to comprehend...It is...difficult to grasp even for workers in closely neighboring fields. ...There is much more reliance on word… Age
- Some of the shrewdest insight into natural processes have been greeted at the outset by the exclamation 'But that's ridiculous'. Age
- It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the… All
- Society evolves not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other. Beings