Quote

We need science, more and better science, not for its technology, not for leisure, not even for health or longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival.

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
Better
Acquire
Need
Survival
Must
Health
Needs
Technology
Even
Wisdom
Kind
Hope
Culture
Longevity
Science
Leisure

More quotes by Lewis Thomas

Image
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
Image
The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance
Lewis Thomas
Image
Most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning.
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
For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.
Lewis Thomas
Image
A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway.
Lewis Thomas
Image
Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.
Lewis Thomas
Image
We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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
Image
Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.
Lewis Thomas
Image
The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not at all mean, as it is sometimes claimed to mean, a search for mastery over nature.
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
The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.
Lewis Thomas
Image
It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by the act of learning all the way.
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
We're as clever as we think we are, but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors.
Lewis Thomas
Image
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
Image
Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.
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
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