Lewis Thomas Quotes

Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as hewill, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod.

It's very odd, being older, because in a way it's hard to own the past, even.

Every cell is a triumph of natural selection, and we’re made of trillions of cells. Within us, is a little universe.

My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.

When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.

A great deal has been learned about cell communication. The universal nature of cellular structure and organization in bacteria, plant and animal cells has been discovered.

The body is a community made up of its innumerable cells or inhabitants.

No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

I've started to see records as just a snapshot, a portrait of where you were at at that time. And if you're comfortable with that, sometimes it's like an old high school year book picture - it makes you blush a little bit, but you gotta learn to really appreciate each stage of your life and where you're at.

That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.

I keep a diary when I have time to. I always know that I'm either having a great time or I'm very busy when there are three weeks of nothing in my diary. But I like to look back because in ten years to the day I can know where I was and what I was doing, and that's a nice feeling.

A cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus.

I wear the key of memory, and can open every door in the house of my life.

This may be a little bit of a provocative thing to say, but the memoirist doesn't owe the reader anything other than a good story and the inclining of the mind in the direction of memory. Of course, the memoirist is not allowed to make things up. But the really skilled memoirist knows what to leave in and what to leave out to serve the story. In autobiography you can't do that.

A journal is more than a memory goad. It's therapeutic. The simple act of opening a notebook to put words down stills the crosscurrents of worry, drawing to focus the essential though patterms that best defines us, intersecting those thoughts with the condition of our life at that exact moment. A journal is one of the few anchors the human condition allows us.

You don't want to get rid of your experiences, because they're your experiences - good or bad - and you need them, but it would be great if they weren't on the video shelf!

Omnis cellula e cellula," he said again. "All cells come from cells. Every cell is born of a previous cell, which was born of a previous cell. Life comes from life. Life begets life begets life begets life begets life.

I don't like to reminisce much, and my walls don't have photographs of me and the actors I was with, or any of that stuff... I try and keep that disciplined, and just work. There are so many traps you can get into, and looking back on your own work is certainly one of them.

The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.

Memory is the medium of the must-have-been.

It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.

If I brought you down to the size of an individual cell so that you could see your body from that perspective, it would offer a whole new view of the world. When you looked back at yourself from that perspective you would not see yourself as a single entity. You would see yourself as a bustling community of more than 50 trillion individual cells.

Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.

It was a reaction from the old idea of "protoplasm", a name which was a mere repository of ignorance.