Creatures Quotes - Page 25

• Every creature alive on the earth today represents an unbroken line of life that stretches back to the first primitive organism to appear on this planet; and that is about three billion years.

  George Wald

  Life, Science, Years

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• If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

  Thomas a Kempis

  Book, Heart, Glasses

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• By ethical conduct toward all creatures, we enter into a spiritual relationship with the universe.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Spiritual, Nature, Animal

  Albert Schweitzer (1966). “The Teaching of Reverence for Life”

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• Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power... but then, so should every other living creature.

  George Eliot

  Life, Exercise, Animal

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• Since every mortal power of Coleridge Was frozen at its marvellous source, The rapt one, of the godlike forehead, The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth: And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, Has vanished from his lonely hearth.

  William Wordsworth

  Lonely, Loneliness, Sleep

  'Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg' (1835)

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• We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It's very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy - where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system. That's clearly not the case when it comes to social systems.

  Nicholas A. Christakis

  Thinking, Order, Humanity

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• Here is the basic question: Are we marionettes, or are we creatures of free will who just happen to have a lot of jerky reflexes?

  Robert Breault

  Free Will, Reflexes, Mankind

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• O men with sisters dear, O men with mothers and wives, It is not linen you 're wearing out, But human creatures' lives!

  Thomas Hood

  Sister, Mother, Men

  'The Song of the Shirt' (1843)

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• What leaders have to remember is that somewhere under the somnolent surface is the creature that builds civilizations, the dreamer of dreams, the risk taker. And remembering that, the leader must reach down to the springs that never dry up, the ever-fresh springs of the human spirit.

  John W. Gardner

  Dream, Spring, Civilization

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• The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage.

  Rollo May

  Courage, Mean, Cat

  Rollo May (1994). “The Courage to Create”, p.14, W. W. Norton & Company

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• A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Dog, Stupid, Boys

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• To be governed ... is to be watched, inspected, directed, indoctrinated, numbered, estimated, regulated, commanded, controlled, law-driven, preached at, spied upon, censured, checked, valued, enrolled - by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Law, Liberty, Libertarian

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• [I]nfectious disease is merely a disagreeable instance of a widely prevalent tendency of all living creatures to save themselves the bother of building, by their own efforts, the things they require. Whenever they find it possible to take advantage of the constructive labors of others, this is the path of least resistance. The plant does the work with its roots and its green leaves. The cow eats the plant. Man eats both of them; and bacteria (or investment bankers) eat the man.

  Hans Zinsser

  Men, Roots, Effort

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• The 4th sort of creatures... which moved through the 3 former sorts, were incredibly small, and so small in my eye that I judged, that if 100 of them lay [stretched out] one by another, they would not equal the length of a grain of course Sand; and according to this estimate, ten hundred thousand of them could not equal the dimensions of a grain of such course Sand. There was discover'd by me a fifth sort, which had near the thickness of the former, but they were almost twice as long.
  The first time bacteria were observed.

  Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

  Eye, Science, Long

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• Nature clasps all her creatures in a universal embrace; there is not one of them which she has not plainly furnished with all means necessary to the conservation of its being.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Nature, Mean, Science

  Michel de Montaigne (1991). “The essays of Michel de Montaigne”, Lane, Allen

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• A single swallow, it is said, devours ten millions of insects every year. The supplying of these insects I take to be a signal instance of the Creator's bounty in providing for the lives of His creatures.

  Ambrose Bierce

  God, Years, Signals

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.24, 谷月社

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• If this [the Mysterium cosmographicum] is published, others will perhaps make discoveries I might have reserved for myself. But we are all ephemeral creatures (and none more so than I). I have, therefore, for the Glory of God, who wants to be recognized from the book of Nature, that these things may be published as quickly as possible. The more others build on my work the happier I shall be.

  Johannes Kepler

  God, Nature, Book

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• Examining this water...I found floating therein divers earthy particles, and some green streaks, spirally wound serpent-wise...and I judge that some of these little creatures were above a thousand times smaller than the smallest ones I have ever yet seen, upon the rind of cheese, in wheaten flour, mould, and the like.

  Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

  Wise, Science, Water

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• Alfred Nobel - pitiable half-creature, should have been stifled by humane doctor when he made his entry yelling into life. Greatest merits: Keeps his nails clean and is never a burden to anyone. Greatest fault: Lacks family, cheerful spirits, and strong stomach. Greatest and only petition: Not to be buried alive. Greatest sin: Does not worship Mammon. Important events in his life: None.

  Alfred Nobel

  Life, Strong, Science

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• And many kinds of creatures must have died,
  Unable to plant out new sprouts of life.
  For whatever you see that lives and breathes and thrives
  Has been, from the very beginning, guarded, saved
  By it's trickery for its swiftness or brute strength.
  And many have been entrusted to our care,
  Commended by their usefulness to us.
  For instance, strength supports a savage lion;
  Foxes rely on their cunning; deer their flight.

  Lucretius

  Life, Death, Science

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• If patterns of ones and zeros were 'like' patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?

  Thomas Pynchon

  Life, Death, Science

  Thomas Pynchon (2012). “Vineland”, p.63, Penguin

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• Not all living creatures die. An amoeba, for example, need never die; it need not even, like certain generals, fade away. It just divides and becomes two new amoebas.

  George Wald

  Life, Death, Science

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• Psychogenesis has led to man. Now it effaces itself, relieved or absorbed by another and a higher function-the engendering and subsequent development of the mind, in one word noogenesis. When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Science, Men, Mirrors

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (2015). “The Phenomenon of Man”, p.140, Lulu Press, Inc

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• St. Augustine and St. Thomas define mortal sin to be a turning away from God: that is, the turning of one's back upon God, leaving the Creator for the sake of the creature. What punishment would that subject deserve who, while his king was giving him a command, contemptuously turned his back upon him to go and transgress his orders? This is what the sinner does; and this is punished in hell with the pain of loss, that is, the loss of God, a punishment richly deserved by him who in this life turns his back upon his sovereign good.

  Alphonsus Liguori

  Kings, Pain, Loss

  Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, Aeterna Press (2016). “The Way of Salvation and of Perfection”, p.44, Aeterna Press

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• Sin will be always acting, if we be not always mortifying, we are lost creatures.

  John Owen

  Acting, Sin, Lost

  John Owen, Rev Terry Kulakowski, Editor “Mortification of Sin”, Lulu.com

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