Lewis Thomas

“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.”

“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.”

“We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.”

“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get.”

“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 dazzle of surprise.”

“The greatest single achievement of science in this most scientifically eloquent of centuries is the discovery that we are profoundly ignorant; we know very little about nature and we understand even less.”

“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.”

“Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive.”

“It is not so bad being ignorant, if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance.”

“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.”

“The words are the cells of language, and the language is an organism.”

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

“There is a tendency for living things to join up, establish linkages, live inside each other, return to the same old primordial bugs.”

“The urge to tidy up is like the instinct for conferring cleanliness, the first and simplest of the sanitary engineering impulses.”