“colonies of social insects are somehow equivalent to vast, multicreatured organisms, possessing collective intelligence and a gift for adaptation far superior to the sum of the individual inhabitants”

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“A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities... We are shared, rented, occupied... Our genomes are catalogs of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature... I cannot feel as separate an entity as I did before I was told these things”

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“A poet is, after all, a sort of scientist, but engaged in a qualitative science in which nothing is measurable... Gauging the fit, he can meticulously place pieces of the universe together, in geometric configurations that are as beautiful and balanced as crystals.”

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“Evolution is still an infinitely long and tedious biologic game, with only the winners staying at the table, but the rules are beginning to look more flexible.”

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“I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.”

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“In the same sense that our judicial system presumes us to be innocent until proved guilty, a medical-care system may work best if it starts with the presumption that most people are healthy.”

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“it is illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the earth... We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia.”

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“language is alive, like an organism... Words are the cells of language, moving the great body, on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. The individual words are like different species of animals.”

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“myths are constructed by a universal logic that, like language itself, is as characteristic for human beings as nest-building is for birds.”

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“Nature abhors a long silence.”

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“Nor is it a new thing for Man to invent an existence that he imagines to be above the rest of life; this has been his most consistent intellectual exertion down the millennia. As illusion, it has never worked out to his satisfaction in the past, any more than it does today.”

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“Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you would think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.”

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“The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.”

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“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds.”

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“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get... to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds.”

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“the gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from all the rest of life. Language is, like nest-building or hive-making, the universal and biologically specific activity of human beings... We cannot be human without it.”

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“the habit has become an addiction: we are hooked on living... We cannot think of giving it up, even when living loses its zest—even when we have lost the zest for zest.”

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“The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth... we pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion.”

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“The most intensely social animals can only adapt to group behavior. Bees and ants have no option when isolated, except to die. There is really no such creature as a single individual; he has no more life of his own than a cast off cell marooned from the surface of your skin.”

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“The mythical animals cataloged in the bestiaries of the world seem, at a casual glance, nothing but exotic nonsense... they are in fact like dreams, and not necessarily bad ones, we may have a hard time doing without them.”

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“the process of aging may be due to the cumulative effect of imprecision, a gradual degrading of information. It is not a system that allows for deviating... Cells are required to stick precisely to the point. Any ambiguity, any tendency to wander from the matter at hand, will introduce grave hazards for the cells, and even more for the host in which they live.”

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“The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity... we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance.”

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“The whole dear notion of one's own Self—marvelous old free-willed, free-enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self—is a myth.”

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“There is a tendency for living things to join up, establish linkages, live inside each other... Any cell – man, animal, fish, fowl, or insect – given the chance and under the right conditions, brought into contact with any other cell, however foreign, will fuse with it.”

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“We are only saved by music from being overwhelmed by nonsense... [by] great quantities of small talk.”

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“we haven't yet learned how to stay human when assembled in masses... For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility, there is nothing to match a nation. Nations, by law, are solitary, self-centered, withdrawn into themselves... It is this aspect of humanity that has lagged behind the rest of evolution”

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“We may be about to discover that dying is not such a bad thing to do after all... It is, after all, the most ancient and fundamental of biologic functions.”

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“We will be lucky if we an postpone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time... to take the place of sitting on the porch re-examining one's watch.”

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