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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

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Lewis Thomas
Age: 80 †
Born: 1913
Born: November 25
Died: 1993
Died: December 3
Medical Writer
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Physician
Poet
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Long Island
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More quotes by 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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Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.
Lewis Thomas
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It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.
Lewis Thomas
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Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists . . . least human of all creatures.
Lewis Thomas
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Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.
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
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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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Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.
Lewis Thomas
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...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
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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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Most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning.
Lewis Thomas
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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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Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.
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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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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It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.
Lewis Thomas
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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
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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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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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The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas