Top 90 Lewis Thomas Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.”

— Lewis Thomas

52. “It’s just plain learning something that you didn’t know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.”

— Lewis Thomas

53. “Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be seperate. Do not be a social animal.”

— Lewis Thomas

54. “I can say, if I like, that social insects behave like the working parts of an immense central nervous system: the termite colony is an enormous brain on millions of legs; the individual termite is a mobile neurone.”

— Lewis Thomas

55. “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.”

— Lewis Thomas

56. “I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.”

— Lewis Thomas

57. “Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.”

— Lewis Thomas

58. “It is a distortion, with something profoundly disloyal about it, to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing, watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces.”

— Lewis Thomas

59. “Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else.”

— Lewis Thomas

60. “Ants are more like the parts of an animal than entities on their own. They are mobile cells, circulating through a dense connective tissue of other ants in a matrix of twigs. The circuits are so intimately interwoven that the anthill meets all the essential criteria of an organism.”

— Lewis Thomas

61. “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.”

— Lewis Thomas

62. “We spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function; it is what we do with our lives.”

— Lewis Thomas

63. “If we had better hearing, and could discern the descants of sea birds, the rhythmic tympani of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.”

— Lewis Thomas

64. “Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on earth. It is hard to think of a more dependable or enduring occupation, harder still to imagine any future events leading to its extinction.”

— Lewis Thomas

65. “It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on.”

— Lewis Thomas

66. “It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in science, awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code.”

— Lewis Thomas

67. “In the fields I know best, among the life sciences, it is required that the most expert and sophisticated minds be capable of changing course – often with a great lurch – every few years.”

— Lewis Thomas

68. “Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions.”

— Lewis Thomas

69. “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.”

— Lewis Thomas

70. “I won’t compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.”

— Lewis Thomas

71. “Most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning.”

— Lewis Thomas

72. “We have dominated and overruled nature, and from now on the earth is ours, a kitchen garden until we learn to make our own chlorophyll and float it out in the sun inside plastic mebranes. We will build Scarsdale on Mount Everest.”

— Lewis Thomas

73. “I do not understand modern physics at all, but my colleagues who know a lot about the physics of very small things, like the particles in atoms, or very large things, like the universe, seem to be running into one queerness after another, from puzzle to puzzle.”

— Lewis Thomas

74. “The human mind is not meant to be governed, certainly not by any book of rules yet written; it is supposed to run itself, and we are obliged to follow it along, trying to keep up with it as best we can.”

— Lewis Thomas

75. “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.”

— Lewis Thomas

76. “If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn’t help; best to let it lie there.”

— Lewis Thomas

77. “If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.”

— Lewis Thomas

78. “We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.”

— Lewis Thomas

79. “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.”

— Lewis Thomas

80. “We have yet to learn how to retain our humaneness when assembled in masses.”

— Lewis Thomas

81. “I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known.”

— Lewis Thomas

82. “Nature abhors a long silence.”

— Lewis Thomas

83. “I do not agree with this century’s fashion of running down the human species as a failed try, a doomed sport. At our worst, we may be going through the early stages of adolescence, and everyone remembers what that is like.”

— Lewis Thomas

84. “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.”

— Lewis Thomas

85. “The earliest sensation at the onset of illness, often preceding the recognition of identifiable symptoms, is apprehension. Something has gone wrong, and a glimpse of mortality shifts somewhere deep in the mind. It is the most ancient of our fears.”

— Lewis Thomas

86. “Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look – quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, ‘red in tooth and claw.’ That came about because people misread Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest.’”

— Lewis Thomas

87. “I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they’d be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today’s identical twins.”

— Lewis Thomas

88. “The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.”

— Lewis Thomas

89. “We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an exhilaration, to recognize that we have such a distance still to go.”

— Lewis Thomas

90. “It is my belief, based partly on personal experience but partly also arrived at by looking around at others, that childhood lasts considerably longer in the males of our species than in the females.”

— Lewis Thomas

91. “I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that.”

— Lewis Thomas

92. “We pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion.”

— Lewis Thomas

93. “If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner or later, for better or worse, as it is in our nature to do.”

— Lewis Thomas

94. “I don’t think that the permanence of the individual human soul is an indispensable part of religious thought.”

— Lewis Thomas

95. “If we ever do achieve freedom from most of today’s diseases, or even complete freedom from disease, we will perhaps terminate by drying out and blowing away on a light breeze, but we will still die.”

— Lewis Thomas

96. “Minnows and catfish can recognize each member of their own species by his particular, person-specific odor. It is hard to imagine a solitary, independent, existentialist minnow, recognizable for himself alone; minnows in a school behave like interchangeable, identical parts of an organism. But there it is.”

— Lewis Thomas

97. “Death is not a sudden-all-at-once affair; cells go down in sequence, one by one. You can, if you like, recover great numbers of them many hours after the lights have gone out, and grow them out in cultures. It takes hours, even days, before the irreversible word finally gets around to all the provinces.”

— Lewis Thomas

98. “I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant. Come to think of it, this might be a good place to start.”

— Lewis Thomas