Lewis Thomas quotes

" The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand. " # Language

" We pass the word around we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry we meditate over the literature we play the music we change our minds we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other. " # Poetry and Poets # Books - Reading # Music

" 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. " # Music # Mind # Love

" The act of smelling something, anything, is remarkably like the act of thinking. Immediately at the moment of perception, you can feel the mind going to work, sending the odor around from place to place, setting off complex repertories through the brain, polling one center after another for signs of re recognition, for old memories and old connection. " # Memory # Love # Mind

" Cells are required to stick precisely to the point. Any ambiguity, any tendency to wander from the matter at hand, will introduce grave hazards for the cells, and even more for the host in which they live. Minor inaccuracies may cause reactions in which neighboring cells are recognized as foreign, and done in. There is a theory that the process of aging may be due to the cumulative effect of imprecision, a gradual degrading of information. It is not a system that allows for deviating. " # Age and Aging # Minorities # Life and Living

" 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. " # Environmentalism # Books - Reading # Voting

" 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. " # Grammar # Freedom # Power

" We are built to make mistakes, coded for error. " # Mistakes

" Statistically, the probability of any of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in contented dazzlement of surprise. " # Statistics # Love # Death and Dying

" The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers. " # Cloning # Computers # Poetry and Poets