"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.“

-Lewis Thomas

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Lewis Thomas quote about work: "Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixe..."

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"Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television."

-Lewis Thomas

"The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature."

-Lewis Thomas

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"I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way."

-Lewis Thomas

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"If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society."

-Lewis Thomas

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"We're as clever as we think we are, but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors."

-Lewis Thomas

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"Very few recognize science as the high adventure it really is, the wildest of all explorations ever taken by human beings, the chance to glimpse things never seen before, the shrewdest maneuver for discovering how the world works."

-Lewis Thomas

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"I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen."

-Tom Stoppard

"Working with my dad was such a gas. We approached the work in a similar way. We only made two films together when I was an adult, Tucker, and Blown Away, but it was so much fun to play with your parent like that."

-Jeff Bridges

"My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful."

-Tom Stoppard

"The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist."

-Novalis

"Close your bodily eye, that you may see your picture first with the eye of the spirit. Then bring to light what you have seen in the darkness, that its effect may work back, from without to within."

-Caspar David Friedrich

"The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work."

-Brian Eno