Lewis ThomasThinkers

The Cat is a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work.

The Cat is the least human of all creatures; it is a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists.

The Committee is a gathering where each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.

The Earth is, when viewed from the distance of the moon, most astonishing in this: that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dead 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. If you could look long enough, you would see the swirling of the great rifts of white cloud, covering and uncovering the half-hidden masses of land. If you had been looking a long, geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion, drifting apart on their crustal plates, held aloft by the fire beneath. It has the organized, self-contented look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun.

Language is that wonderful thing that prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

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.