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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 in a contented dazzlement of surprise.

Lewis Thomas

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Lewis Thomas
Age: 80 †
Born: 1913
Born: November 25
Died: 1993
Died: December 3
Medical Writer
Naturalist
Physician
Poet
Writer
Flushing
Long Island
Fact
Facts
Statistically
Keep
Contented
Would
Probability
Think
Existing
Thinking
Surprise
Mere
Small

More quotes by Lewis Thomas

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It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.
Lewis Thomas
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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 and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.
Lewis Thomas
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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.... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.
Lewis Thomas
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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 act of learning all the way.
Lewis Thomas
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Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.
Lewis Thomas
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The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.
Lewis Thomas
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We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas
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It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on.
Lewis Thomas
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On any Tuesday morning, if asked, a good working scientist will tell you with some self-satisfaction that the affairs of his field are nicely in order, that things are finally looking clear and making sense, and all is well. But come back again on another Tuesday, and the roof may have just fallen in on his life's work.
Lewis Thomas
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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 swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway.
Lewis Thomas
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The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.
Lewis Thomas
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Most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning.
Lewis Thomas
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For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.
Lewis Thomas
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We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can postpone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time.
Lewis Thomas
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I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.
Lewis Thomas
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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 as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today's identical twins.
Lewis Thomas
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The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves most things, in fact, are better in the morning.
Lewis Thomas
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We are spectacular splendid manifestations of life. We have language. We have affection. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.
Lewis Thomas
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I don't think that the permanence of the individual human soul is an indispensable part of religious thought.
Lewis Thomas
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I can say, if I like, that social insects behave like the working parts of an immense central nervous system: the termite colony is an enormous brain on millions of legs the individual termite is a mobile neurone.
Lewis Thomas