3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves most things, in fact, are better in the morning.
3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas Much of today’s public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may forever be overlooking the whole by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts.
3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not at all mean, as it is sometimes claimed to mean, a search for mastery over nature.
3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.
3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.
3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.
3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance.
3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.
3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one’s own genes in the generations to follow.
3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.
3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun’s position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway.
3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas Very few recognize science as the high adventure it really is, the wildest of all explorations ever taken by human beings, the chance to glimpse things never seen before, the shrewdest maneuver for discovering how the world works.
3 December 2020 Lewis Thomas Our behavior toward each other is the strangest, most unpredictable, and most unaccountable of all the phenomena with which we are obliged to live. In all of nature, there is nothing so threatening to humanity as humanity itself.
