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The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance
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
Accomplishment
Discovery
Ignorance
Century
Greatest
Science
Human
Humans
Accomplishments
More quotes by Lewis Thomas
Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.
Lewis Thomas
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, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart.
Lewis Thomas
It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.
Lewis Thomas
We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours.
Lewis Thomas
Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.
Lewis Thomas
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 human mind.
Lewis Thomas
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
Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists . . . least human of all creatures.
Lewis Thomas
Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.
Lewis Thomas
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 take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.
Lewis Thomas
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
Science will...produce the data..., but never the full meaning. For perceiving real significance, we shall need...most of all the brains of poets, [and] also those of artists, musicians, philosophers, historians, writers in general.
Lewis Thomas
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
Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves... They do everything but watch television.
Lewis Thomas
We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas
I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting.
Lewis Thomas
We are educated to be amazed by the infinite variety of life forms in nature. We are, I believe, only at the beginning of being flabbergasted by its unity.
Lewis Thomas
Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.
Lewis Thomas
Most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning.
Lewis Thomas
It would seem to me... an offense against nature, for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with the curiosity, filled to overbrimming as we are with questions, and naturally talented as we are for the asking of clear questions, and then for us to do nothing about, or worse, to try to suppress the questions.
Lewis Thomas
