Quote

We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.

Lewis Thomas

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lewis Thomas
Age: 80 †
Born: 1913
Born: November 25
Died: 1993
Died: December 3
Medical Writer
Naturalist
Physician
Poet
Writer
Flushing
Long Island
Built
Mistake
Science
Make
Coded
Error
Errors
Mistakes

More quotes by Lewis Thomas

Image
We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?
Lewis Thomas
Image
We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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
Image
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
Image
For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.
Lewis Thomas
Image
We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of the selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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
Image
We are spectacular splendid manifestations of life. We have language. We have affection. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.
Lewis Thomas
Image
Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, 'red in tooth and claw.' That came about because people misread Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.'
Lewis Thomas
Image
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
Image
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.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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
Image
A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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.
Lewis Thomas
Image
I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting.
Lewis Thomas
Image
I don't think that the permanence of the individual human soul is an indispensable part of religious thought.
Lewis Thomas
Image
Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.
Lewis Thomas