Fungi Quotes

• Fungi are the interface organisms between life and death.

  Paul Stamets

  Life And Death, Interfaces, Organisms

  Paul Stamets (2011). “Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World”, p.17, Ten Speed Press

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• I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi.

  Derrick Jensen

  Lying, Tree, Foundation

  Derrick Jensen (2011). “Truths Among Us: Conversations on Building a New Culture : Interviews”, p.210, PM Press

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• Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound. By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi, the most unsightly objects become radiant of beauty. There seem to be two sides of this world, presented us at different times, as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death. And seen with the eye of the poet, as God sees them, all things are alive and beautiful.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Beautiful, Eye, Two Sides

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• Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Love, Morning, Growing Up

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Maudemarie Clark, Brian Leiter (1997). “Nietzsche: Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality”, p.171, Cambridge University Press

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• Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat restoration.

  Paul Stamets

  Restoration, Habitat, Vanguard

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• The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.

  E. O. Wilson

  Player, Cycling, Energy

  "An Interview With E.O. Wilson, the Father of the Encyclopedia of Life". Interview with David Pogue, www.nytimes.com. October 23, 2008.

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• Why did the mushroom go to the party?
  Because he's a fungi!

  Louis Tomlinson

  Party, Mushrooms

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• If a healthy soil is full of death, it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds ... Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long.

  Wendell Berry

  Life, Death, Long

  Wendell Berry (2015). “The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture”, p.70, Counterpoint

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• ...no matter how complex or affluent, human societies are nothing but subsystems of the biosphere, the Earth's thin veneer of life, which is ultimately run by bacteria, fungi and green plants.

  Vaclav Smil

  Running, Nature, Green Plants

  Vaclav Smil (2005). “Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties”, p.350, MIT Press

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• The love for material things grows like a fungus in the soul and destroys the loveliness of the human heart utterly.

  Caryll Houselander

  Heart, Greed, Soul

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• Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?

  Aldous Huxley

  Fun, War, Yesterday

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• Truth grew in my mind like a fungus, and though I tried to sleep it out, there was no resisting the epiphanies.

  Donald Miller

  Sleep, Mind, Epiphany

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• Now when you cut a forest, an ancient forest in particular, you are not just removing a lot of big trees and a few birds fluttering around in the canopy. You are drastically imperiling a vast array of species within a few square miles of you. The number of these species may go to tens of thousands. Many of them are still unknown to science, and science has not yet discovered the key role undoubtedly played in the maintenance of that ecosystem, as in the case of fungi, microorganisms, and many of the insects.

  E. O. Wilson

  Science, Cutting, Numbers

  "Naturally Good: A Behavioral History of Moral Development from Charles Darwin to E.O. Wilson". Book by John Henry Morgan, 2005.

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• "I'm hoping that the more you see me, the more I'll grow on you."
  "Like a fungus?

  Charlaine Harris

  Eric, Sookie Stackhouse, Grows

  "The First Sookie eBook Collection". Book by Charlaine Harris, 2011.

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• A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Book, Mysterious, Natural

  1850 Journal entry,16 Nov. In Bradford Torrey and F H Allen (eds) The Journals of Henry David Thoreau (1906).

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• Mycologists are few and far between. We are under-funded, poorly represented in the context of other sciences - ironic as the very foundation of our ecosystems are directly dependent upon fungi, which ultimately create the foundation of soils.

  Paul Stamets

  Ecosystems, Ironic, Foundation

  "TEDMED: Can Mushrooms Help the Immune System Fight Cancer? Interview With Paul Stamets, Mycologist". Interview with Dr. Patricia Fitzgerald, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 2, 2011.

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• The fungi became, or is for some mysterious reason still to be discovered, a pipeline into a mind, an entelechy, which we can only image as feminine and can only associate somehow to the environment, to the ecosystem. This is the Gaian mind. This is what the goddess really is. The goddess is a network of connective intelligence that is operating on this planet.

  Terence McKenna

  Ecosystems, Mind, Pipeline

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• I'm like a fungus; you can't get rid of me.

  Adam Baldwin

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• Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves... They do everything but watch television.

  Lewis Thomas

  Children, War, Army

  "A Long Line of Cells: Collected Essays".

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• I collect spores, molds, and fungus.

  Harold Ramis

  Mold

  "Fictional character: Dr. Egon Spengler". "Ghostbusters", www.imdb.com. 1984.

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• Lions mane may be our first smart mushroom. It is a safe, edible fungus that appears to confer cognitive benefits on our aging population.

  Paul Stamets

  Smart, Mushrooms, Firsts

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• Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

  James Joyce

  Ideas, Fire, Flames

  James Joyce (2005). “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, p.138, Collector's Library

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• A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.

  Edward Abbey

  Critics, Oaks

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.34, RosettaBooks

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• Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything.

  Jaime Lerner

  Bureaucracy, Government Bureaucracy

  "Quiet revolution". Interview with Tom Phillips, www.theguardian.com. March 26, 2008.

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• Sometimes I worry I'm not going to be the best parent because if my baby gets a skin fungus I might sell him at a garage sale.

  Sara Quin

  Baby, Worry, Parent

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