"My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of……" — Lewis Thomas
"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 sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter."
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Lewis Thomas
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130 Quotes by Lewis Thomas
Lewis Thomas has 130 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that…
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Animals, even plants, lie to each other all the time, and we could restrict the research to them, putting off…
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The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages…
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I cannot think of a single field in biology or medicine in which we can claim genuine understanding, and it…
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Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of…
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I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea…
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I do not understand modern physics at all, but my colleagues who know a lot about the physics of very…
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It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and…
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The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological…
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It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science…
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It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail…
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Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.
See all 130 quotes by Lewis Thomas »
More Bacteria Quotes
This quote is filed under Bacteria Quotes,
one of 90 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won't be…
— Noam Chomsky
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But however secure and well-regulated civilized life may become, bacteria, Protozoa, viruses, infected fleas, lice, ticks, mosquitoes, and bedbugs will…
— Hans Zinsser
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Intelligence is a valuable thing, but it is not usually the key to survival. Sheer fecundity ... usually counts. The…
— Isaac Asimov
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With one linear centimeter of your lower colon there lives and works more bacteria (about 100 billion) that all humans…
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Most educated people are aware that we're the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend…
— Martin Rees
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... [I]nfectious disease is merely a disagreeable instance of a widely prevalent tendency of all living creatures to save themselves…
— Hans Zinsser
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[Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].
— E. O. Wilson
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Without birds to feed on them, the insects would multiply catastrophically. ... The insects, not man or other proud species,…
— H. Bentley Glass
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However, on many occasions, I examined normal blood and normal tissues and there was no possibility of overlooking bacteria or…
— Robert Koch
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It has occurred to me that possibly the white corpuscles may have the office of picking up and digesting bacterial…
— Unknown Author
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It seems now clear that a belief in the functional importance of all enzymes found in bacteria is possible only…
— Marjory Stephenson
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Perhaps bacteria may tentatively be regarded as biochemical experiments; owing to their relatively small size and rapid growth, variations must…
— Marjory Stephenson
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