Citas de Lewis Thomas

• 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

  Thinking, Facts, Surprise

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack for being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as often as the right ones. We get along in life this way.

  Lewis Thomas

  Life, Mistake, Creativity

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• La capacidad de equivocarse ligeramente es la verdadera maravilla del ADN. Sin este atributo especial, seguiríamos siendo bacterias anaerobias y no habría música.

  Lewis Thomas

  Real, Science, Dna

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• 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.

  Lewis Thomas

  Real, Artist, Data

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• 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

  Learning, Science, Realization

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• 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

  Science, Understanding, Trying

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• 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

  Health, People, Dying

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• 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

  Life, Death, Fear

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• We do not understand much of anything, from... the "big bang" , all the way down to the particles in the atoms of a bacterial cell. We have a wilderness of mystery to make our way through in the centuries ahead.

  Lewis Thomas

  Science, Cells, Bangs

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• Dejamos huellas de nosotros mismos allá donde vamos, en todo lo que tocamos.

  Lewis Thomas

  Reality, Goes On

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?

  Lewis Thomas

  Life, Gratitude, Earth Day

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• La necesidad de hacer música, y de escucharla, es universalmente expresada por los seres humanos. No puedo imaginar, ni siquiera en nuestros tiempos más primitivos, la aparición de pintores con talento para hacer pinturas rupestres sin que hubiera habido, cerca de ellos, personas igualmente creativas haciendo canciones. Es, como el habla, un aspecto dominante de la biología humana.

  Lewis Thomas

  Song, Hands, People

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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

  Lewis Thomas

  Space, Musical, Would Be

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• 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.

  Lewis Thomas

  Change, Music, Unique

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• 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

  School, Sea, Feet

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up.

  Lewis Thomas

  Growing Up, Learning, Science

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

  Lewis Thomas

  Rest Of Life, Language, Mark

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn't help; best to let it lie there.

  Lewis Thomas

  Lying, Moving, Ideas

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• 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

  Music, Effort, Brain

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• Las hormigas se parecen tanto a los seres humanos que resultan vergonzosas. Cultivan hongos, crían pulgones como ganado, lanzan ejércitos a la guerra, utilizan aerosoles químicos para alarmar y confundir a los enemigos, capturan esclavos... Hacen de todo menos ver la televisión.

  Lewis Thomas

  Children, War, Army

  "A Long Line of Cells: Collected Essays".

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• 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

  Children, Real, Errors

  Lewis Thomas (1996). “Fragile Species”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

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• I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others.

  Lewis Thomas

  Knowledge, Science, Talking

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• 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

  Morning, Doctors, Wife

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• We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.

  Lewis Thomas

  Party, Dna, Sea

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• 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

  Life, Science, Thinking

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