Top 90 Lewis Thomas Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting.”

— Lewis Thomas

2. “Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you’d think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.”

— Lewis Thomas

3. “The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.”

— Lewis Thomas

4. “Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.”

— Lewis Thomas

5. “Good science is done by being curious in general, by asking questions all around, by acknowledging the likelihood of being wrong and taking this in good humor for granted, by having a deep fondness for nature, and by being made jumpy and nervous by ignorance.”

— Lewis Thomas

6. “The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.”

— Lewis Thomas

7. “We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch.”

— Lewis Thomas

8. “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.”

— Lewis Thomas

9. “We need science, more and better science, not for its technology, not for leisure, not even for health or longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival.”

— Lewis Thomas

10. “Good applied science in medicine, as in physics, requires a high degree of certainty about the basic facts at hand, and especially about their meaning, and we have not yet reached this point for most of medicine.”

— Lewis Thomas

11. “The whole dear notion of one’s own Self-marvelous old free-willed, free- enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self- is a myth.”

— Lewis Thomas

12. “Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.”

— Lewis Thomas

13. “I cannot think of a single field in biology or medicine in which we can claim genuine understanding, and it seems to me the more we learn about living creatures, especially ourselves, the stranger life becomes.”

— Lewis Thomas

14. “It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.”

— Lewis Thomas

15. “Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.”

— Lewis Thomas

16. “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

17. “Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.”

— Lewis Thomas

18. “Man is embedded in nature.”

— Lewis Thomas

19. “The dilemma of modern medicine, and the underlying central flaw in medical education and, most of all, in the training of interns, is the irresistible drive to do something, anything. It is expected by patients and too often agreed to by their doctors, in the face of ignorance.”

— Lewis Thomas

20. “Things are bound to begin happening if you’ve got your wits about you. You create the lucky accidents.”

— Lewis Thomas

21. “Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.”

— Lewis Thomas

22. “The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth.”

— Lewis Thomas

23. “Given any new technology for transmitting information, we seem bound to use it for great quantities of small talk. We are only saved by music from being overwhelmed by nonsense.”

— Lewis Thomas

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

— Lewis Thomas

25. “We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.”

— Lewis Thomas

26. “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.”

— Lewis Thomas

27. “Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.”

— Lewis Thomas

28. “Society evolves not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.”

— Lewis Thomas

29. “The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance.”

— Lewis Thomas

30. “I don’t want to be reincarnated, that’s for sure. When you’ve had rewarding experiences in your life – a loving family, friends – you don’t need additional reassurances that you’re going to do something with a new cast of characters. I’d just as soon pass.”

— Lewis Thomas

31. “Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat is an unscrutable mystery.”

— Lewis Thomas

32. “It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance...”

— Lewis Thomas

33. “We are educated to be amazed by the infinite variety of life forms in nature. We are, I believe, only at the beginning of being flabbergasted by its unity.”

— Lewis Thomas

34. “The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.”

— Lewis Thomas

35. “We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of the selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground.”

— Lewis Thomas

36. “Altruism has always been one of biology’s deep mysteries. Why should any animal, off on its own, specified and labeled by all sorts of signals as its individual self, choose to give up its life in aid of someone else?”

— Lewis Thomas

37. “Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one’s own genes in the generations to follow.”

— Lewis Thomas

38. “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 of my life.”

— Lewis Thomas

39. “The uniformity of the earth’s life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled.”

— Lewis Thomas

40. “We are spectacular splendid manifestations of life. We have language. We have affection. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.”

— Lewis Thomas

41. “The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.”

— Lewis Thomas

42. “In real life, every field of science is incomplete, and most of them – whatever the record of accomplishment during the last 200 years – are still in their very earliest stages.”

— Lewis Thomas

43. “It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by the act of learning all the way.”

— Lewis Thomas

44. “Of all celestial bodies within reach or view, as far as we can see, out to the edge, the most wonderful and marvellous and mysterious is turning out to be our own planet earth. There is nothing to match it anywhere, not yet anyway.”

— Lewis Thomas

45. “We habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European countryside. But since then we’ve smoked it up and littered it and dumped too much in too many waters. I don’t think it’s our privilege to behave this way.”

— Lewis Thomas

46. “Montaigne simply turns his mind loose and writes whatever he feels like writing. Mostly, he wants to say that reason is not a special, unique gift of human beings, marking us off from the rest of nature.”

— Lewis Thomas

47. “The oldest, easiest to swallow idea was that the earth was man’s personal property, a combination of garden, zoo, bank vault, and energy source, placed at our disposal to be consumed, ornamented, or pulled apart as we wished.”

— Lewis Thomas

48. “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.”

— Lewis Thomas

49. “We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the most visible and centrally placed of our adversaries. We assume that they must somehow relish what they do.”

— Lewis Thomas

50. “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.”

— Lewis Thomas