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

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

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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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The emphasis of study upon a particular aspect of music is in itself ideological because it contains implications about the music's value.

Lucy Green

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

Thomas Carlyle Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827)

Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.

Eduard Hanslick

Above the pitch, out of tune, and off the hinges.

François Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532)

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.