Quote

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

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
Nature
Educational
Form
Variety
Believe
Unity
Life
Educated
Forms
Infinite
Beginning
Flabbergasted
Inspirational
Amazed

More quotes by 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
If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.
Lewis Thomas
Image
We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?
Lewis Thomas
Image
We spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function it is what we do with our lives.
Lewis Thomas
Image
It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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
Image
I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known.
Lewis Thomas
Image
Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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.
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
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
Image
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
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
Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.
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
Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.
Lewis Thomas
Image
It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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
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