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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.

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
Always
Profoundly
Patching
Picture
Teetering
Watching
Disloyal
Health
Flapping
Pieces
Fallible
Human
Needing
Humans
Distortion
Something
Verge
Contraption

More quotes by Lewis Thomas

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Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.
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The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance
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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.
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It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.
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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.
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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.
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It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on.
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The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.
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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.
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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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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.
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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
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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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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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Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.
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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.
Lewis Thomas
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The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves most things, in fact, are better in the morning.
Lewis Thomas
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It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in science, awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code.
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As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the face of the earth in just a few thousand years, no time at all as evolution clocks time, covering all livable parts of the planet, endangering other forms of life, and now threatening ourselves.
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