Lewis Thomas Quotes

The instincts of the ant are very unimportant, considered as the ants; but the moment a ray of relation is seen to be a monitor, a little body with a mighty heart, then all its habits, even that said to be recently observed, that it never sleeps, become sublime.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

I think puns are not just the lowest form of wit, but the lowest form of human behavior.

Humor is everywhere in that there's irony in just about anything a human does.

We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.

Jerry Seinfeld is amazing in many ways, not the least of them his ability to find humor, and convincing us to find it, too, in the million-and-two details about modern life that under different circumstances might send us into paroxysms of rage.

If nothing is serious anymore, then there's nothing to satirize.

The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.

Why can't people credit that he and all of us had a sense of humour?

Actually being funny is mostly telling the truth about things.

Most jokes state a bitter truth.

Jokes are very curious things psychologically.

The more real it is, the funnier it is. The more awkward it is, the more people are stumbly, the funnier it is. I like a sharp joke, but it has to say something that someone would actually say.

Comedy is a reaction to the world, and I think it really helps to be an outsider. I've always been very interested in people's behavior, to the point of being obsessed - seeing what people needed and reading them, I think that's the backbone of comedy.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

And I think comedy obviously a great way to get a message out because you know the reason why things are funny is because they're true.

I'm a sarcastic, observational storyteller.

My brand of comedy is taking a serious approach to silliness. Small moments of modern life and human behavior make me laugh. At least that's where everything starts, and then my other through line would be a dry absurdity that exponentially spirals out of reality.

I'm tongue in cheek, but very much to the point.

When I went to college, I really became interested in cultural anthropology. Our behavior isn't that different from other primate species'.

My style of comedy is probably absurdist, observational, and Olympian.

Ants are a curious race

I hunt deer because they aren't capable of higher forms of thinking. All they care about is, 'What am I going to eat next, who am I going to screw next, and can I run fast enough to get away'. They are very much like the French in that way.

I'm a sarcastic person. I learn through humor.

I have my own views about Nature's methods, though I feel that it is rather like a beetle giving his