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It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.

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
Behavior
Collectives
Collective
Mysterious

More quotes by Lewis Thomas

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Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists . . . least human of all creatures.
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We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.
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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.
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I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they'd be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today's identical twins.
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Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.
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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.
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Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.
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The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.
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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.
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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.
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It is a distortion, with something profoundly disloyal about it, to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing, watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces.
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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.
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For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.
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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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We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the most visible and centrally placed of our adversaries. We assume that they must somehow relish what they do.
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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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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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The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.
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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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.
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