Skip to content

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.

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

Another quote →

More quotes by Lewis Thomas

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)

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)

All Lewis Thomas quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Lewis Thomas (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.