I can say, if I like, that social insects behave like the working parts of an immense central nervous system: the termite colony is an enormous brain on millions of legs; the individual termite is a mobile neurone.
Lewis ThomasRead
If we had better hearing, and could discern the descants of sea birds, the rhythmic tympani of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that if we were more attuned to the sounds of nature, it could deeply affect and uplift us.
Lewis Thomas reflects on the beauty and complexity of natural sounds, implying that a heightened sensitivity to these auditory experiences could profoundly impact our emotional and spiritual well-being. He emphasizes the interconnectedness of life and the uplifting power of nature's symphony.
Themes
NatureSoundsMusicHearingEmotion
In practice
Example use cases
In a nature conservation speech to highlight the beauty of wildlife sounds.
More from Lewis Thomas
All quotes →I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known.
Lewis ThomasRead
I maintain, despite the moment's evidence against the claim, that we are born and grow up with a fondness for each other, and we have genes for that. We can be talked out of it, for the genetic message is like a distant music, and some of us are hard-of-hearing. Societies are noisy affairs, drowning out the sound of ourselves and our connection.
Lewis ThomasRead
Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.
Lewis ThomasRead
It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in science, awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code.
Lewis ThomasRead
In the fields I know best, among the life sciences, it is required that the most expert and sophisticated minds be capable of changing course - often with a great lurch - every few years.
Lewis ThomasRead
Similar quotes
In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.
Paul R. EhrlichRead
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Galileo GalileiRead
Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful.
Edward AbbeyRead
The more you go on, the less you need people standing between you and the animal and the camera waving their arms about.
David AttenboroughRead
The earth's crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.
Pierre Teilhard De ChardinRead
Wilderness trails constitute a rare space in America marked by economic diversity. Lawyers and construction workers get bitten by the same mosquitoes and sip from the same streams; there are none of the usual signals about socioeconomic status, for most hikers are in shorts and a T-shirt and enveloped by an aroma that would make a skunk queasy.
Nicholas KristofRead