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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.

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

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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)

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)

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Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Not for the body, but for the heart; companion and company are needed.

Sanu Sharma

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson

Every morning
I wake up with the news
of bloodshed.
I feel my body,
desperate to know whether
I’m still alive.

Suman Pokhrel

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.