Lewis Thomas
Lewis Thomas
Lewis Thomaswas an American physician, poet, etymologist, essayist, administrator, educator, policy advisor, and researcher...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth25 November 1913
CountryUnited States of America
responsibility reality trying
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.
real learning aesthetic
It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.
real lying flower
Animals, even plants, lie to each other all the time, and we could restrict the research to them, putting off the real truth about ourselves for the several centuries we need to catch our breath. What is it that enables certain flowers to resemble nubile insects, or opossums to play dead, or female fireflies to change the code of their flashes in order to attract, and then eat, males of a different species?
children real errors
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.
ignorance knowledge reality
It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance...
real artist data
Science will...produce the data..., but never the full meaning. For perceiving real significance, we shall need...most of all the brains of poets, [and] also those of artists, musicians, philosophers, historians, writers in general.
science realization astonishment
Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.
reality goes-on
We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch.
real years accomplishment
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.
real science dna
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.
blowing waves wind
The waves were big and the wind was blowing hard.
affection close genes guess nature splendid
We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a "common goal" of nature as I can guess at.
base feeding human knack mistakes provided root structure useful
Mistakes are at the very base of human thought feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done.
ice shows wind
It just shows you that wind can take the ice like it was nothing.