Organisms Quotes - Page 15

• A city grows like an organism. It is a structure of living and working together a mix of functions.

  Jaime Lerner

  Cities, Working Together, Structure

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• The steady states of the fluid matrix of the body are commonly preserved by physiological reactions, i.e., by more complicated processes than are involved in simple physico-chemical equilibria. Special designations, therefore, are appropriate:—“homeostasis” to designate stability of the organism; “homeostatic conditions,” to indicate details of the stability; and “homeostatic reactions,” to signify means for maintaining stability.

  Walter Bradford Cannon

  Mean, Simple, Special

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• Nature has put itself the problem how to catch in flight light streaming to the earth and to store the most elusive of all powers in rigid form. To achieve this aim, it has covered the crust of earth with organisms which in their life processes absorb the light of the sun and use this power to produce a continuously accumulating chemical difference. ... The plants take in one form of power, light; and produce another power, chemical difference.

  Robert Mayer

  Differences, Light, Use

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• Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Men, Talking, Privilege

  "Crime and Punishment". Book by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866.

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• fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism--something it is like for the organism.

  Thomas Nagel

  Ifs And, Consciousness, States

  Thomas Nagel (2012). “Mortal Questions”, p.166, Cambridge University Press

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• You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.

  Geoffrey West

  Order, Law, Cities

  "The Sameness of Organisms, Cities, and Corporations". Interview with Ben Lillie, blog.ted.com. July 26, 2011.

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• The problem that we, as living organisms, face - and not we only, humans, but any living organism faces - is the management of life.

  Antonio Damasio

  Faces, Management, Problem

  "The Evolving Minds Of Humans". "Science Friday" with Ira Flatow, www.npr.org. November 12, 2010.

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• You have ... been told that science grows like an organism. You have been told that, if we today see further than our predecessors, it is only because we stand on their shoulders. But this [Nobel Prize Presentation] is an occasion on which I should prefer to remember, not the giants upon whose shoulders we stood, but the friends with whom we stood arm in arm ... colleagues in so much of my work.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Giants, Arms

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• The soul is something which contains the body. The body doesn't contain the soul. The soul, if we put it into modern language, is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists.

  Alan Watts

  Soul, Body, Language

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• Ageing is very rare. We only see it in humans and laboratory animals and in zoo animals and in our pets. Basically, organisms that are protected from the external world. Once you create that protection, you live long enough to see ageing.

  S. Jay Olshansky

  Zoos, Animal, Long

  "The Time Of Our Lives" (Part 1), www.abc.net.au. May 24, 2007.

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• Man is an organism, not a mechanism; and the mechanical pacing of his life does harm to his human responses, which naturally follow a kind of free rhythm.

  Richard M. Weaver

  Men, Doe, Kind

  Richard M. Weaver, Ted J. Smith (2000). “In defense of tradition: collected shorter writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929-1963”, Liberty Fund Inc.

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• It is the relationship between the physical environment and the environed organism, between physiography and ontography (to coin a term), that constitutes the essential principles of geography today.

  William Morris Davis

  Today, Principles, Essentials

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• At this point, an urgent question arises: [...] Is it our duty to seek to become a thorough and complete human being, one quite sufficient unto himself; or, on the contrary, to be only a part of a whole, the organ of an organism? Briefly, is the division of labor, at the same time that it is a law of nature, also a moral rule of human conduct; and, if it has this latter character, why and in what degree?

  Emile Durkheim

  Character, Law, Division Of Labor

  "De la division du travail social (The Division of Labor in Society)". Book by Emile Durkheim (p. 41 in 1947 translation of George Simpson), 1893.

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• Where philosophy ends, poetry must commence. There should not be a common point of view, a natural manner of thinking which standsin contrast to art and liberal education, or mere living; that is, one should not conceive of a realm of crudeness beyond the boundaries of education. Every conscious link of an organism should not perceive its limits without a feeling for its unity in relation to the whole. For example, philosophy should not only be contrasted to non-philosophy, but also to poetry.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Art, Philosophy, Philosophical

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• So if hunger provokes wailing and wailing brings the breast; if the breast permits sucking and milk suggests its swallow; if swallowing issues in sleep and stomachy comfort, then need, ache, message, object, act, and satisfaction are soon associated like charms on a chain; shortly our wants begin to envision the things which well reduce them, and the organism is finally said to wish.

  William H. Gass

  Sleep, Issues, Wish

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• Any attempt to reduce the complex properties of biological organisms or of nervous systems or of human brains to simple physical and chemical systems is foolish.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Simple, Brain, Nervous

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• Every living body continuously eliminates feces, it rejects what is not serviceable to the assimilating organism: what man despises, what arouses his disgust, what he calls evil, are excrements.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Evil, Body

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• In seeking to avoid evil, humanity is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is our ingenuity, rather than our animal nature, that has given our fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.

  Ernest Becker

  Fate, Exercise, Animal

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• Beespittle, droppings, hairs
  of beefur: all become honey.
  Virulent micro-organisms cannot
  survive in honey.

  Denise Levertov

  Hair, Honey, Dropping

  Denise Levertov (1983). “Poems of Denise Levertov, 1960-1967”, p.213, New Directions Publishing

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• Reproduction is so primitive and fundamental a function of vital organisms that the mechanism by which it is assured is highly complex and not yet clearly understood. It is not necessarily connected with sex, nor is sex necessarily connected with reproduction.

  Havelock Ellis

  Sex, Fundamentals, Function

  Havelock Ellis (2013). “Psychology of Sex: The Biology of Sex—The Sexual Impulse in Youth—Sexual Deviation—The Erotic Symbolisms—Homosexuality—Marriage—The Art of Love”, p.7, Butterworth-Heinemann

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• We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.

  Cornel West

  Space, Vanishing, Disappear

  "Cornel West, 'Living And Loving Out Loud'". "Talk of the Nation" with Neal Conan, www.npr.org. October 29, 2009.

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• No one has ever found an organism that is known not to have parents, or a parent. This is the strongest evidence on behalf of evolution.

  Tom Bethell

  Parent, Evolution, Found

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• The investigation into the possible effects of cosmic rays on living organisms will also offer great interest.

  Victor Francis Hess

  Rays, Investigation, Interest

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• The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona. I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me, Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And its a woman whos extremely vain.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Men, Cities, Haunting

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• The tendency of life is not the preservation of the species, but solely the preservation of each individual organism, as long as it is in existence at all, and is able to carry on its life processes.

  Boris Sidis

  Long, Able, Life Is

  "Nervous Ills their Cause and Cure" by Boris Sidis, (p. 20), 1922.

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