Lewis ThomasA 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 o… ▶371ThoughtTime
Lewis ThomasAs a people, we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as m… ▶372DeathHumanityLife
Lewis ThomasWe 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 m… ▶362Humor
Lewis ThomasI do not agree with this century's fashion of running down the human species as a failed try, a doomed sport. At our worst, we may be going through the early stages of adolescence… ▶363Humanity
Lewis ThomasViewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. ... It has the organized, self-contained look of a live crea… ▶341Life
Lewis ThomasMost of the time I've worked in labs if I didn't encounter something in a week entirely unexpected and surprising I'd consider it a lost week. Lots of that is due to mistakes and … ▶363ReflectionTime
Lewis ThomasThe overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts … ▶364Love
Lewis ThomasWe are told that the trouble with modern man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature... In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the Earth… ▶364Death
Lewis ThomasWe are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a 'common goal' … ▶332LifeLove
Lewis ThomasIt is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn't get all the meaning you wanted or expected, … ▶366PhilosophyReading
Lewis ThomasEverything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else. ✨ Lewis Thomas (1990). A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays378Life
Lewis ThomasGood science is done by being curious in general, by asking questions all around, by acknowledging the likelihood of being wrong and taking this in good humor for granted, by havi… ▶313Humor
Lewis ThomasWe habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European countryside. But since then we've smoked … ▶379Thought
Lewis ThomasAnimals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the spec… ▶357Thought
Lewis ThomasThe commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick … ▶358LifeLove
Lewis ThomasI cannot think of a single field in biology or medicine in which we can claim genuine understanding, and it seems to me the more we learn about living creatures, especially oursel… ▶303LifeThought
Lewis ThomasViewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in… ▶314HopeLife
Lewis ThomasIt is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in… ▶281SadnessThoughtTime
Lewis ThomasThe gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life. ✨ Lewis Thomas (1990). A Long Line of Cells Collected E… ▶3710HumanityLife
Lewis ThomasI would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting.3710Reflection
Lewis ThomasThe only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature... It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and… ▶293HumanityTimeTruth
Lewis ThomasI 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 … ▶315Humanity
Lewis ThomasDoctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on earth. It is hard to think of a more dependab… ▶326HopeThoughtTime
Lewis ThomasThe 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, wh… ▶3510ThoughtTimeTruth
Lewis ThomasWe do not understand much of anything, from... the big bang , all the way down to the particles in the atoms of a bacterial cell. We have a wilderness of mystery to make our way t… ▶294Death
Lewis ThomasWe can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an e… ▶272LifeTruth
Lewis ThomasLeft to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends. ✨ Lewis Thomas (1990). A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays294Philosophy
Lewis ThomasMedical 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 … ▶272Death
Lewis ThomasI 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 … ▶294Reading
Lewis ThomasWorrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions. ✨ Lewis Thomas (1990). A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays283Humanity
