Lewis Thomas Quotes


"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
(Related: Family, Fact)

"We are built to make mistakes, coded for error."
- Lewis Thomas
(Related: Error, Mistakes)

"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
(Related: Doctors, Fact, Public, Wives)

"We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch."
- Lewis Thomas
"If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society."
- Lewis Thomas
(Related: Society, Responsibility, Want)

"It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on."
- Lewis Thomas
(Related: Spirit, Word)

"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
(Related: Music, Work, Effort, Listening, Mind)

"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
(Related: Road)

"Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
- Lewis Thomas
(Related: Language)

"The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers."
- Lewis Thomas
(Related: Poetry, Science, Control, Growth, Computer, Engineering, Flowers, Worry)