Famous Quotes

"A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart."

Lewis Thomas on Experience

More quotes about Experience

• "Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards."

  Soren Kierkegaard on Experience

• "The only source of knowledge is experience."

  Albert Einstein on Experience

• "Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn."

  C. S. Lewis on Experience

• "Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."

  Oscar Wilde on Experience

• "A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."

  Mark Twain on Experience

More quotes by Lewis Thomas

• "A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart."

• "A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway."

• "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."

• "Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow."

• "There's really no such thing as the agony of dying. I'm quite sure that pain is shut off at the moment of death. You see, something happens when the body knows it's about to go. Peptide hormones are released by cells in the hypothalamus and pituitary gland. Endorphins. They attach themselves to the cells responsible for feeling pain."