All Lewis Thomas Quotes
- Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a… Bach
- We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch. Go
- We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to… Among
- Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all… All
- We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me… Along
- Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and… Ahead
- A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location for the next… Argue
- I maintain, despite the moment's evidence against the claim, that we are born and grow up with a fondness for each other, and we have… Affair
- Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical… Alarm
- There's really no such thing as the agony of dying. I'm quite sure that pain is shut off at the moment of death. You see,… Agony
- The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. Ignorant
- Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the… Advantage
- I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that… Ants
- The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not at all mean, as… All
- Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development... the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad. All
- Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand. From
- If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or… Anon
- Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow. Biology
- Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions. All
- As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the face of the… Across
- Of all celestial bodies within reach or view, as far as we can see, out to the edge, the most wonderful and marvellous and mysterious… All
- The earliest sensation at the onset of illness, often preceding the recognition of identifiable symptoms, is apprehension. Something has gone wrong, and a glimpse of… Ancient
- The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times,… Aspect
- A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths,… Agony
- Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on earth. It is… Any