Thomas Lewis Quotes

Love is simultaneous mutual regulation, wherein each person meets the needs of the other, because neither can provide for his own.

The brain’s dense thicket of interrelationships, like those of history or art, does not yield to the reductivist’s bright blade.

Every mental activity — contemplating a theorem, savoring a hot fudge sundae, dreaming of the boy next door — consists of neurons firing in a certain sequence.

Humanity began in a precarious world where tiny bands foraged and scrimped for food by day, huddled together for warmth by night. With the advent of agriculture came mass aggregation in towns and cities. The industrial revolution took work out of the home, making the populace “a mass of undifferentiated equals, working in a factory or scattered between the factories, the mines, and the offices, bereft forever of the feeling that work was a family affair, done within the household.” Economies prospered as families dissipated. In pursuit of further riches, the information age demands a more thoroughgoing surrender — less time for relationships, less time for children, more time for impersonal everything. Before our lives wither away into dust, we might ponder how much more prosperity human beings can possibly survive.

Loving is limbically distinct from in love. Loving is mutuality ; loving is synchronous attunement and modulation. As such, adult love depends critically upon knowing the other. In love demands only the brief acquaintance necessary to establish an emotional genre but does not demand that the book of the beloved’s soul be perused from preface to epilogue. Loving derives from intimacy, the prolonged and detailed surveillance of a foreign soul.