A Quote 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.
I just think it's really funny and entertaining. I mean, I don't necessarily take them really seriously - I don't even think a lot of really good films get seen. But I don't think that's what it's about. I mean, how amazing was Ellen Burstyn in Requiem For A Dream ? Especially as she was acting with herself most of the time. I don't understand how a performance like that can't win. I was so affected by that movie that I had to turn it off. I felt as if I was on drugs and my heart was about to leap out of my body.
Only those who have never known fear are allowed to think less of others for being afraid. Frankly, I think anyone who has never been afraid of anything in their entire life is either a liar or lacks imagination.
Why does death engender fear? Because death meant change, a change greater then we have ever known, and because death was indeed a mirror that made us see ourselves as never before. A mirror that we should cover, as people in olden days covered mirrors when someone died, for fear of an evil. For with all our care and pain for those who had gone, it was ourselves too we felt the agony for. Perhaps ourselves above all.
I had very little fear about it, but basically, my straight friends talked me out of it. I think they thought as I was bisexual, there was no need to. But it's amazing how much more complicated it became because I didn't come out in the early days. I often wonder if my career would have taken a different path if I had.
There's an awful lot of misunderstanding here about what being poor actually means. I don't think people understand that being poor means you have to work from dawn until dusk just to survive through the day. I think there's some notion that poor people lie about all day not doing anything. It is remarkable how many misconceptions there are here about life in the developing world and I think that that knowledge gap has done a lot to contribute to the imbalance quite frankly.
Big L is my favorite rapper of all time. He got killed quite a few years ago now but I think he's amazing and he kind of inspires me like his style inspires me. I don't think there's been anyone better since. I mean, Biggie Smalls is definitely on the top of the list but Big L is like the underdog, I like to give him the edge.
I certainly think we're losing a lot of our connections with other people. I fear in my most pessimistic moments that the computer is simply another step down the road which we have already taken quite a few steps on. We're talking to each other on computers because we don't talk across the fence.
To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?
We should think more about it, and accustom ourselves to the thought of death. We can't allow the fear of death to creep up on us unexpectedly. We have to make the fear familiar, and one way is to write about it. I don't think writing and thinking about death is characteristic only of old men. I think that if people began thinking about death sooner, they'd make fewer foolish mistakes.
I enjoy the freedom of living alone and not having anyone interfere with my belongings. I mean, I'm quite a selfish human being. I think being in the public eye and growing up, it's made me quite selfish in some respects. I can be extremely generous with friends, but in relationships I can be quite mean in terms of my time and my affections. I take people for granted, and I'm trying not to do that.
There's really a lot of lessons that I've learned from being Miss Universe. I don't even know where to begin. Just being able to travel a lot and meet people from different walks of life. I don't think I've experienced anything like it or would experience anything like it.
There shouldn't be a death in the ring. There should never have been deaths in the ring, because people - deaths in the ring occur because they don't keep up with the records well enough. They are putting mismatches together. The people who are licensed to stop a fight, the referee and the corner, don't do it for fear that the audience is going to object to them stopping a fight.
The interesting thing for me about the debate about same-sex marriage ... is that it's one of those issues where it has no impact on anyone apart from the people that it impacts upon. So I find it quite bewildering that it's - that it's so complicated for people.
I think a lot of people - to be candid about it - are like, if Donald Trump can be president, so can I. And I think there's a whole crop, a new generation of people who aren't on the tip of anyone's tongue, just like Bill Clinton wasn't on anyone's tongue; just like a lot of people didn't expect Barack Obama to take off like he did. I think we will have a lot of new people running, and there are obviously a lot of fantastic people who have run before, or standard-bearers, right. All right. So, I think there's just going to be a ton of those people.
Each of us can discuss God inasmuch as he has known the grace of the Holy Spirit; for how can we think of or discuss what we haven't seen, or haven't head of, or don't know? The saints say that they have seen God, but there are people who say that there is no God. Clearly, they say this because they haven't known God, but this does not at all mean that He is not. The saints speak of that which they have truly seen and know.
I think there are different kinds of poetry for different stages of life and there's the wild, exuberance of youth, there's the painful agony of midlife experience, there's the late poetry in the presence of death.
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