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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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Lewis Thomas
Age: 80 †
Born: 1913
Born: November 25
Died: 1993
Died: December 3
Medical Writer
Naturalist
Physician
Poet
Writer
Flushing
Long Island
Aesthetic
Learning
Experience
Didn
Real
Something
Dumbfounded
Plain

More quotes by 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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We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch.
Lewis Thomas
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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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On any Tuesday morning, if asked, a good working scientist will tell you with some self-satisfaction that the affairs of his field are nicely in order, that things are finally looking clear and making sense, and all is well. But come back again on another Tuesday, and the roof may have just fallen in on his life's work.
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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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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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
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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.
Lewis Thomas
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Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.
Lewis Thomas
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Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.
Lewis Thomas
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If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.
Lewis Thomas
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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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The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.
Lewis Thomas
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I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting.
Lewis Thomas
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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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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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We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas
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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
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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.
Lewis Thomas
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Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.
Lewis Thomas