#th

A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#agony #amazing #anyone #anything #apart

A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees; maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#anyway #argue #bees #best #calculate

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#altruism #because #been #confer #continuing

I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#attention #basics #college #concentrate #courses

People innately have lots of solutions. It sounds like an obvious thing, but everyone thinks that they can be prime minister; everyone thinks that they can do a better job. ↗

— Mark Thomas

#better job #everyone #innately #job #like

As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the face of the earth in just a few thousand years, no time at all as evolution clocks time, covering all livable parts of the planet, endangering other forms of life, and now threatening ourselves. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#clocks #covering #earth #endangering #evolution

At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#early #evolution #future #growing #growing up

Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on earth. It is hard to think of a more dependable or enduring occupation, harder still to imagine any future events leading to its extinction. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#any #been #busy #costume #culture

Having long suspected that there was something alive in there, running the place, separate from everything else, absolutely individual and independent, we've celebrated by giving it a real name. My self. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#alive #celebrated #else #everything #giving

I don't think that the permanence of the individual human soul is an indispensable part of religious thought. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#human soul #i #indispensable #individual #individual human