Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dry as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming, membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos.
Lewis ThomasIt's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.
Lewis ThomasWell, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, 'red in tooth and claw.' That came about because people misread Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.'
Lewis ThomasAnimals 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 ThomasSome of the shrewdest insight into natural processes have been greeted at the outset by the exclamation 'But that's ridiculous'.
Lewis Thomas