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The human mind is not meant to be governed, certainly not by any book of rules yet written it is supposed to run itself, and we are obliged to follow it along, trying to keep up with it as best we can.

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
Human
Rules
Humans
Certainly
Follow
Book
Along
Trying
Written
Governed
Mind
Running
Obliged
Keep
Supposed
Best
Meant

More quotes by Lewis Thomas

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The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.
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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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.
Lewis Thomas
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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.
Lewis Thomas
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It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.
Lewis Thomas
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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
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We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas
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The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas
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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.
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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Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists . . . least human of all creatures.
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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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.
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 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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Most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning.
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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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
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At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.
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