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We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?

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
Lives
Feel
Feels
Life
Environmental
Gratitude
Sun
Environment

More quotes by Lewis Thomas

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Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists . . . least human of all creatures.
Lewis Thomas
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We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of the selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground.
Lewis Thomas
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At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.
Lewis Thomas
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The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas
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The body of science is not, as it is sometimes thought, a huge coherent mass of facts, neatly arranged in sequence, each one attached to the next by a logical string. In truth, whenever we discover a new fact it involves the elimination of old ones. We are always, as it turns out, fundamentally in error.
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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Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.
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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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, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.
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 do not understand modern physics at all, but my colleagues who know a lot about the physics of very small things, like the particles in atoms, or very large things, like the universe, seem to be running into one queerness after another, from puzzle to puzzle.
Lewis Thomas
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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
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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 better or worse, as it is in our nature to do.
Lewis Thomas
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It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.
Lewis Thomas
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We need science, more and better science, not for its technology, not for leisure, not even for health or longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival.
Lewis Thomas
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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
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We have dominated and overruled nature, and from now on the earth is ours, a kitchen garden until we learn to make our own chlorophyll and float it out in the sun inside plastic mebranes. We will build Scarsdale on Mount Everest.
Lewis Thomas
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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
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Good applied science in medicine, as in physics, requires a high degree of certainty about the basic facts at hand, and especially about their meaning, and we have not yet reached this point for most of medicine.
Lewis Thomas
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We're as clever as we think we are, but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors.
Lewis Thomas