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Lewis Thomas
(25 Nov 1913 - 3 Dec 1993)
American physician and author best known for his reflective essays on a wide range of topics in biology.
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Lewis Thomas Quotes on Life (10 quotes)
>> Click for 61 Science Quotes by Lewis Thomas
>> Click for Lewis Thomas Quotes on | Ant | DNA | Error | Gene | Knowledge | Language | Learning | Mind | Nature | New | Science | Species | Truth | Universe |
>> Click for 61 Science Quotes by Lewis Thomas
>> Click for Lewis Thomas Quotes on | Ant | DNA | Error | Gene | Knowledge | Language | Learning | Mind | Nature | New | Science | Species | Truth | Universe |
...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.
— Lewis Thomas
In Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony(1984), 74.
A poet is, after all, a sort of scientist, but engaged in a qualitative science in which nothing is measurable. He lives with data that cannot be numbered, and his experiments can be done only once. The information in a poem is, by definition, not reproducible. ... He becomes an equivalent of scientist, in the act of examining and sorting the things popping in [to his head], finding the marks of remote similarity, points of distant relationship, tiny irregularities that indicate that this one is really the same as that one over there only more important. Gauging the fit, he can meticulously place pieces of the universe together, in geometric configurations that are as beautiful and balanced as crystals.
— Lewis Thomas
In The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974, 1995), 107.
I 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 ourselves, the stranger life becomes.
— Lewis Thomas
In 'On Science and Certainty', Discover Magazine (Oct 1980).
It is not a simple life to be a single cell, although I have no right to say so, having been a single cell so long ago myself that I have no memory at all of that stage in my life.
— Lewis Thomas
In A Long Line of Cells: Collected Essays (1990), 244.
Long lives are not necessarily pleasurable…. We will be lucky if we can postpone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time. Something will surely have to be found to take the place of sitting on the porch re-examining one’s watch.
— Lewis Thomas
In 'The Long Habit', The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974), 57.
The most intensely social animals can only adapt to group behavior. Bees and ants have no option when isolated, except to die. There is really no such creature as a single individual; he has no more life of his own than a cast off cell marooned from the surface of your skin.
— Lewis Thomas
In The Lives of a Cell (1974), 63.
The 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 to comprehend it, is the earth. We are only now beginning to appreciate how strange and splendid it is, how it catches the breath, the loveliest object afloat around the sun, enclosed in its own blue bubble of atmosphere, manufacturing and breathing its own oxygen, fixing its own nitrogen from the air into its own soil, generating its own weather at the surface of its rain forests, constructing its own carapace from living parts: chalk cliffs, coral reefs, old fossils from earlier forms of life now covered by layers of new life meshed together around the globe, Troy upon Troy.
— Lewis Thomas
In Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (1984), 22-23.
The uniformity of the earth’s life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance.
— Lewis Thomas
In The Lives of a Cell (1974), 5.
We 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” for all of nature as I can guess at.
— Lewis Thomas
In The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974, 1995), 16-17.
We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?
— Lewis Thomas
Earth Ethics (Summer 1990).
See also:
- 25 Nov - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Thomas's birth.
- The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, by Lewis Thomas. - book suggestion.
- Booklist for Lewis Thomas.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
