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Lewis Thomas Quotes

1913–1993 United States

Lewis Thomas (25 November 1913 - 3 December 1993) was a physician, author, administrator, educator, policy advisor and researcher. He served as a Dean of Yale Medical School, Dean of the New York University School of Medicine and President of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute.

United States
Academics
Educators
Essayists
Physicians

Also known as: Thomas, Lewis

Random Lewis Thomas quote

21 quotes

Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency.

The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

Usefulness may turn out to be the hardest test of fitness for survival, more important than aggression, more effective, in the long run, than grabbiness.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

You can’t do this and keep a straight face.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

Everyone says, stay away from ants. They have no lessons for us; they are crazy little instruments, inhuman, incapable of controlling themselves, lacking manners, lacking souls.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings.

The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

We are endowed with genes which code out our reaction to beavers and otters, maybe our reaction to each other as well.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute out of reach, beyond our control.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

I have always had a bad memory, as far back as I can remember.

The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher (1983)

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.

A Long Line of Cells : Collected Essays (1990)

I must mend the ways of my mind. This is a very big place, and I do not know how it works.

The Fragile Species (1992)

Statistically the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you would think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.

The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner or later, for better or worse, as it is in our nature to do.

The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

It is my belief, based partly on personal experience but partly also arrived at by looking around at others, that childhood lasts considerably longer in the males of our species than in the females.

The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine Watcher (1983)

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

It is nice to think that there are so many unsolved puzzles ahead for biology, although I wonder whether we will ever find enough graduate students.

The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

Be individuals, solitary and selfish, is the message. Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be separate. Do not be a social animal.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

As 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 much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Lewis Thomas (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.