Quote

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

Lewis Thomas

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
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
Image
Most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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 it is sometimes claimed to mean, a search for mastery over nature.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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 on society.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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
Image
Given any new technology for transmitting information, we seem bound to use it for great quantities of small talk. We are only saved by music from being overwhelmed by nonsense.
Lewis Thomas
Image
We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas
Image
Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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
Image
Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.
Lewis Thomas
Image
...the life of the planet began the long, slow process of modulating and regulating the physical conditions of the planet. The oxygen in today's atmosphere is almost entirely the result of photosynthetic living, which had its start with the appearance of blue-green algae among the microorganisms.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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, something happens when the body knows it's about to go. Peptide hormones are released by cells in the hypothalamus and pituitary gland. Endorphins. They attach themselves to the cells responsible for feeling pain.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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