Thomas Lewis Quotes

#1. The first part of emotional healing is being limbically known - having someone with a keen ear catch your melodic essence. (170)

Thomas Lewis

#2. What Richard Selzer, M.D. once wrote of surgery is true of therapy: only human love keeps this from being the act of two madmen.

Thomas Lewis

#3. The brevity of mini (psycho)therapies is another efficient forestaller of healing. The neocortex rapidly master didactic information, but the limbic brain takes mountains of repetition. No one expects to play the flute in six lessons or to become fluent in Italian in ten. (189)

Thomas Lewis

#4. DNA is not the heart's destiny; the genetic lottery may determine the cards in your deck, but experience deals the hand you can play.

Thomas Lewis

#5. I don't believe in God for the same reason that most people don't believe in Apollo or Zeus ... God is just human beings' way of personifying an otherwise completely natural universe.

Thomas Lewis

#6. The skill of becoming and remaining attuned to another's emotional rhythms requires a solid investment of years. (205)

Thomas Lewis

#7. An ironic revelation of the television-computer age is that what people want from machines is humanity: stories, contact, and interaction.

Thomas Lewis

#8. Emotions are humanity's motivator and its omnipresent guide. (36)

Thomas Lewis

#9. The brain's dense thicket of interrelationships, like those of history or art, does not yield to the reductivist's bright blade. (91)

Thomas Lewis

#10. Real knowledge, true knowledge, comes from knowing why.

Thomas Lewis

#11. In a dazzling vote of confidence for form over substance, our culture fawns over the fleetingness of being "in love" while discounting the importance of loving. (206)

Thomas Lewis

#12. The benefits of deep attachment are powerful - regulated people feel whole, centered, alive. (208)

Thomas Lewis

#13. One brain's blueprint may promote joy more readily than most; in another, pessimism reigns. Whether happiness infuses or eludes a person depends, in part, on the DNA he has chanced to receive. (152)

Thomas Lewis

#14. Our society's love affair with mechanical devices that respond at a button-touch ill prepares us to deal with the unruly organic mind that dwells within. Anything that does not comply must be broken or poorly designed, people now suppose, including their hearts.

Thomas Lewis

#15. Knowing someone is the first goal of therapy. Modulating emotionality - whether by relatedness or psychopharmacology or both - is second. Therapy's last and most ambitious aim is revising the neural code that directs an emotional life. (176)

Thomas Lewis

#16. Being well regulated in relatedness is the deeply gratifying state that people seek ceaselessly in romance, religions, and cults; in husbands and wives, pets, softball teams, bowling leagues, and a thousand other features of human life driven by the thirst for sustaining affiliations. (157)

Thomas Lewis

#17. Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love. (144)

Thomas Lewis

#18. Long-standing togetherness writes permanent changes into a brain's open book. In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. (144)

Thomas Lewis

#19. Love is simultaneous mutual regulation, wherein each person meets the needs of the other, because neither can provide for his own. (208)

Thomas Lewis

#20. Natural selection awards no prize for second place.

Thomas Lewis

#21. The mind-body clash has disguised the truth that psychotherapy is physiology. When a person starts therapy, he isn't beginning a pale conversation; he is stepping into a somatic state of relatedness. (168)

Thomas Lewis

#22. People differ in their proficiency at tracing the outlines of another self, and thus their ability to love also varies. (207)

Thomas Lewis

#23. In all of its varied and protean forms, love is the tether binding our whirling lives. Without that biological anchor, all of us are flung outward, singly into the encroaching dark. (225)

Thomas Lewis

#24. But dividing the mind into "biological" and "psychological" is as fallacious as classifying light as a particle or a wave. The natural world makes no promise to align itself with preconceptions that humans find parsimonious or convenient. (167)

Thomas Lewis

#25. Modern amorists are sometimes taken aback at the prospect of investing in a relationship with no guarantee of reward. It is precisely that absence, however, that separates gift from shrewdness. Love cannot be extracted, commanded, demanded, or wheedled. It can only be given. (208)

Thomas Lewis