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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
Naturalist
Physician
Poet
Writer
Flushing
Long Island
Brain
Musician
Historian
Science
Writers
Brains
Artist
General
Musicians
Also
Poet
Poets
Need
Meaning
Significance
Real
Produce
Philosopher
Perceiving
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Shall
Data
Historians
Never
Full
Artists
Philosophers
More quotes by Lewis Thomas
We spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function it is what we do with our lives.
Lewis Thomas
It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.
Lewis Thomas
Montaigne simply turns his mind loose and writes whatever he feels like writing. Mostly, he wants to say that reason is not a special, unique gift of human beings, marking us off from the rest of nature.
Lewis Thomas
Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.
Lewis Thomas
We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch.
Lewis Thomas
We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.
Lewis Thomas
The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.
Lewis Thomas
Most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning.
Lewis Thomas
Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.
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
We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas
Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.
Lewis Thomas
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
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
Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists . . . least human of all creatures.
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
The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.
Lewis Thomas
We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?
Lewis Thomas
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
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
