182 Quotes by Lewis Thomas

Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists . . . least human of all creatures.

Man is embedded in nature.

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

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?

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

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

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

Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.