Organisms Quotes - Page 13

• An organism at war with itself is doomed.

  Carl Sagan

  War, Doomed

  "Cosmos". TV Mini-Series, www.imdb.com. 1980.

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• A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.

  Wallace Stegner

  Writing, Heart, Cutting

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• No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

  Shirley Jackson

  Dream, Wall, Reality

  Shirley Jackson (2006). “The Haunting of Hill House”, p.19, Penguin

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• A farm includes the passion of the farmer's heart, the interest of the farm's customers, the biological activity in the soil, the pleasantness of the air about the farm -- it's everything touching, emanating from, and supplying that piece of landscape. A farm is virtually a living organism. The tragedy of our time is that cultural philosophies and market realities are squeezing life's vitality out of most farms. And that is why the average farmer is now 60 years old. Serfdom just doesn't attract the best and brightest.

  Joel Salatin

  Philosophy, Heart, Passion

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• There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Country, Philosophy, Book

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• One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

  Aldous Huxley

  Thinking, Two, Self

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• We shall never understand the natural environment until we see it as a living organism. Land can be healthy or sick, fertile or barren, rich or poor, lovingly nurtured or bled white. Our present attitudes and laws governing the ownership and use of land represent an abuse of the concept of private property.... Today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see and nobody calls the cops.

  Paul Brooks

  Life, Attitude, Law

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• Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.

  Mary Parker Follett

  Women, Majority Rule, Numbers

  Mary Parker Follett (1918). “The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government”, p.7, Penn State Press

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• Our task now is to resynthesize biology; put the organism back into its environment; connect it again to its evolutionary past; and let us feel that complex flow that is organism, evolution, and environment united. The time has come for biology to enter the nonlinear world.

  Carl Woese

  Past, Tasks, World

  "A New Biology for a New Century" by Carl Woese, mmbr.asm.org. June 1, 2004.

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• It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in the morning and feel bored.

  Stephen Batchelor

  Morning, Taken, Years

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• Pumpkins are the only living organisms with triangle eyes.

  Harland Williams

  Eye, Triangles, Pumpkin

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• We are convinced, then, that autistic people have their place in the organism of the social community. They fulfil their role well, perhaps better than anyone else could, and we are talking of people who as children had the greatest difficulties and caused untold worries to their care-givers.

  Hans Asperger

  Children, Talking, People

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• The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Conscious, Arise, Subjects

  Thomas Metzinger (2009). “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”, p.96, Basic Books

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• Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.

  Joseph Beuys

  Art, Order, Social

  Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (1979). “Joseph Beuys”

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• The river moves from land to water to land, in and out of organisms, reminding us what native peoples have never forgotten: that you cannot separate the land from the water, or the people from the land.

  Lynn Culbreath Noel

  Rain, Moving, Lakes

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• The general struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials, these for organisms are air water & soil, all abundantly available, nor for energy which exists in plenty in the sun and any hot body in the form of heat, but rather a struggle for entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold earth.

  Ludwig Boltzmann

  Struggle, Air, Water

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• Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.

  William James

  Inspirational, Life, Moving

  Letter toWincenty Lutoslawski, 6 May 1906

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• The theory of natural selection is the centerpiece of The Origin of Species and of evolutionary theory. It is this theory that accounts for the adaptations of organisms, those innumerable features that so wonderfully equip them for survival and reproduction; it is this theory that accounts for the divergence of species from common ancestors and thus for the endless diversity of life. Natural selection is a simple concept, but it is perhaps the most important idea in biology.

  Douglas J. Futuyma

  Simple, Ideas, Diversity

  Douglas J. Futuyma (2009). “Evolution”, Sinauer Associates Incorporated

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• The probability for the chance of formation of the smallest, simplest form of living organism known is 1 to 10340,000,000.... The size of this figure is truly staggering, since there are only supposed to be approximately 10 electrons in the whole universe!

  Harold Morowitz

  Size, Chance, Evolution

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• These microscopic organisms form an entire world composed of species, families and varieties whose history, which has barely begun to be written, is already fertile in prospects and findings of the highest importance. The names of these organisms are very numerous and will have to be defined and in part discarded. The word microbe which has the advantage of being shorter and carrying a more general meaning, and of having been approved by my illustrious friend, M. Littré, the most competent linguist in France, is one we will adopt.

  Louis Pasteur

  Science, Names, Nomenclature

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• The techniques have galloped ahead of the concepts. We have moved away from studying the complexity of the organism; from processes and organisation to composition.

  James Black

  Science, Drug, Technique

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• As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

  Karl Marx

  Life, Real, Party

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1975). “Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: collected works”

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• Yet is it possible in terms of the motion of atoms to explain how men can invent an electric motor, or design and build a great cathedral? If such achievements represent anything more than the requirements of physical law, it means that science must investigate the additional controlling factors, whatever they may be, in order that the world of nature may be adequately understood.

  Arthur Compton

  Mean, Science, Men

  "The Human Meaning of Science".

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• Hinduism is a living organism. One and indivisible at the root, it has grown into a vast tree with innumerable branches. Knowledge is limitless and so also the application of truth. Everyday we add to our knowledge of the power of Atman (soul) and we shall keep on doing so.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Roots, Tree, Soul

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• Where it is in his own interest, every organism may reasonably be expected to aid his fellows. Where he has no alternative, he submits to the yoke of communal servitude. Yet given a full chance to act in his own interest, nothing but expediency will restrain him from brutalizing, from maiming, from murdering his brother, his mate, his parent, or his child. Scratch an 'altruist' and watch a 'hypocrite' bleed.

  Michael Ghiselin

  Brother, Children, Hypocrite

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