“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
Author: Lewis Thomas
Category: medical
Tags: medical, Lewis Thomas
“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
Author: Lewis Thomas
Category: family
Tags: family, Lewis Thomas
“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.”
— Lewis Thomas
Author: Lewis Thomas
Category: future
Tags: future, Lewis Thomas
“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
Author: Lewis Thomas
Category: science
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“The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.”
— Lewis Thomas
Author: Lewis Thomas
Category: nature
Tags: nature, Lewis Thomas
“The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.”
— Lewis Thomas
Author: Lewis Thomas
Category: truth
Tags: truth, Lewis Thomas
“We 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 is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds.”
— Lewis Thomas
Author: Lewis Thomas
Category: nature
Tags: nature, Lewis Thomas
“Our behavior toward each other is the strangest, most unpredictable, and most unaccountable of all the phenomena with which we are obliged to live. In all of nature, there is nothing so threatening to humanity as humanity itself.”
— Lewis Thomas
Author: Lewis Thomas
Category: nature
Tags: nature, Lewis Thomas
“It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.”
— Lewis Thomas
Author: Lewis Thomas
Category: intelligence
Tags: intelligence, Lewis Thomas
“Doctors, 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 dependable or enduring occupation, harder still to imagine any future events leading to its extinction.”
— Lewis Thomas
Author: Lewis Thomas
Category: future
Tags: future, Lewis Thomas
“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
Author: Lewis Thomas
Category: work
Tags: work, Lewis Thomas