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Lewis Thomas

Lewis Thomas Quotes

Physician

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Famous Lewis Thomas Quotes

“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.”

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Book:Fragile Species
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“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.”

WellsTwoDifferentSelfSeemsOpportunityGivenConditionsSourceNakedCellsSelf RespectChickensDividesLackingMonstrousSense Of SelfHybridFuseNucleusYeastProgeny
Book:A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays
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“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.”

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Author:Lewis Thomas
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“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.”

MadeEnergyShiningImprovementDrivingCellsProvidingStrictInteriorsMitochondria
Book:A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays
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“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.”

MenTryingHas BeensCountryEarthForceTroubleModernBirdSurfaceFlightRisingFragileDelicateBubblesScenariosPondsModern Man
Book:A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays
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“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.”

ThinkingReasonUseProblemLevelsNumbersBrainShareInformationHugeCleverReason WhyJust OneNo ReasonEndeavorPoolHuge Numbers
Author:Lewis Thomas
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“I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that.”

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Book:Fragile Species
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“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.”

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Book:A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays
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“The 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 scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of twentieth-century science to the human intellect.”

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Book:A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays
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“As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up.”

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Author:Lewis Thomas
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“When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.”

IfsFirstsMeanSeemsReadingActorsIndividualLinesActingGroupsIdentityCostMembersHighestPrioritiesDisabilityCommitteesActing Out
Author:Lewis Thomas
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“Animals, even plants, lie to each other all the time, and we could restrict the research to them, putting off the real truth about ourselves for the several centuries we need to catch our breath. What is it that enables certain flowers to resemble nubile insects, or opossums to play dead, or female fireflies to change the code of their flashes in order to attract, and then eat, males of a different species?”

NeedsDifferentRealPlayTruthScienceLyingCertainOrderAnimalCenturyFlowerResearchFemaleBreathsPlantSpeciesMalesCodeFlashInsectsFireflyReal Truth
Book:Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony
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“The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything. To be sure, it is hidden away in bone and conducts internal affairs in secrecy, but virtually all the business is the direct result of thinking that has already occurred in other minds.”

ThinkingMindHumansEarthFacesResultsBrainMessagesDirectAffairBonesInternalsOrgansSecrecyHuman BrainInternal Affairs
Book:A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays
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“I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others.”

IfsKnowsHumansI CanScienceIndividualExistenceConsciousnessTalkingKnowledgeMysterySeaAwarenessPlanetsCreaturesSpeciesEntitledWormsWhalesPrimatesGnats
Book:A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays
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“It 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 science, awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code.”

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Book:Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony
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“The greatest achievements in the science of this [twentieth] century are themselves the sources of more puzzlement than human beings have ever experienced. Indeed, it is likely that the twentieth century will be looked back at as the time when science provided the first close glimpse of the profundity of human ignorance. We have not reached solutions; we have only begun to discover how to ask questions.”

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Author:Lewis Thomas
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“...the life of the planet began the long, slow process of modulating and regulating the physical conditions of the planet. The oxygen in today's atmosphere is almost entirely the result of photosynthetic living, which had its start with the appearance of blue-green algae among the microorganisms.”

LifeLongTodayScienceProcessResultsConditionsPlanetsBlueGreenAppearanceAtmosphereOxygenAlgaeMicroorganisms
Book:The Nineteenth Cosmos Club Award, Lewis Thomas, M.D.
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“We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of the selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground.”

WayMindHumansTwoDifferentSometimesScienceChoicesSituationTenTwentiesDancingBoundsLiftsDifferent WaysFinestSelectionRichness
Book:A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays
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