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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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Lewis Thomas
Age: 80 †
Born: 1913
Born: November 25
Died: 1993
Died: December 3
Medical Writer
Naturalist
Physician
Poet
Writer
Flushing
Long Island
Inspirational
Amazed
Nature
Educational
Form
Variety
Believe
Unity
Life
Educated
Forms
Infinite
Beginning
Flabbergasted
More quotes by Lewis Thomas
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
It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.
Lewis Thomas
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
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
I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting.
Lewis Thomas
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
If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.
Lewis Thomas
Given the opportunity, under the right conditions, two cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell, say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and the two nuclei will then fuse as well, and the new hybrid cell will now divide into monstrous progeny. Naked cells, lacking self-respect, do not seem to have any sense of self.
Lewis Thomas
The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.
Lewis Thomas
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
The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.
Lewis Thomas
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
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
It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.
Lewis Thomas
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.
Lewis Thomas
We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.
Lewis Thomas
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
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
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
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
