Organisms Quotes - Page 2

• Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Process, Aim, Vigorous

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.128, Simon and Schuster

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• You have to understand that it's a very cooperative world, not only with the environment, with but our fellow human beings. If you do not cooperate, if you do not work together to keep the entire organism going, the whole thing dies, and everybody dies with it. That's a law of nature, and it's existed forever. We're one of the very few creatures that has a choice, and can intellectualize the process.

  George Lucas

  Law, Choices, Forever

  "Cinematic Phenomenon". Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 19, 1999.

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• It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it.

  Kevin Kelly

  Literature, Lessons, Evolution

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• When a system is in turbulence, the turbulence is not just out there in the environment, but is a part of the organization or organism that you are looking at.

  Kevin Kelly

  Organization, Environmental, Turbulence

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• The daily grinding of evolution, as accelerated by technology, churns out more and more complex organisms, with higher rates of energy use, and with increasing specialization. Minds are the ideal way to express complexity, energy density, increasing specialization, expanding diversity -- all in one system. Mindedness is what evolution produces. Mindedness is what technology wants, too.

  Kevin Kelly

  Technology, Diversity, Mind

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• There is no waste in functioning natural ecosystems. All organisms, dead or alive, are potential sources of food for other organisms. A caterpillar eats a leaf; a robin eats the caterpillar; a hawk eats the robin. When the plant, caterpillar, robin, and hawk die, they are in turn consumed by decomposers.

  G. Tyler Miller

  Science, Ecosystems, Robins

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• But in fact, when you try to model that on a computer you find that because of the very structure of matter and of the chemical bonds that are the basis of every organism, evolution is not random at all. It will tend to follow certain paths.

  Kevin Kelly

  Trying, Matter, Path

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• An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.

  Kevin Kelly

  Organization, Literature, Able

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• The simplest single-celled organism oscillates to a number of different frequencies, at the atomic, molecular, sub-cellular, and cellular levels. Microscopic movies of these organisms are striking for the ceaseless, rhythmic pulsation that is revealed. In an organism as complex as a human being, the frequencies of oscillation and the interactions between those frequencies are multitudinous.

  George Leonard

  Numbers, Humanity, Different

  George Leonard (2009). “The Silent Pulse”, p.23, Gibbs Smith

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• Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the whole of human personality. His insistence on the sanctity of nature was part of an attempt to develop Goethe's intuition that form cannot be put together in the mind by an additive process, but is to be deduced from the laws of growth in living organisms, and their resistance to the elements.

  Kenneth Clark

  Art, Law, Personality

  John Ruskin, Kenneth Clark (1991). “Selected writings”, Penguin Group USA

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• A favorite science fiction writer of mine is William Faulkner! It was an idea that came to me once, years ago, and I've never quite been able to shake it. This is facetious, on one level at least. There are telepaths in As I Lay Dying. But I think the most compelling thing for me is there are moments with him where I just feel these are not humans talking to each other. These are some hyper-intelligent, yet-to-be-born organisms. The way they look at the past without having any loss of knowledge – everything that ever happened is still here.

  Robert Reed

  Loss, Thinking, Intelligent

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• The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.

  David Bohm

  Civilization, Unbroken, Way

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• Flying. Whatever any other organism has been able to do man should surely be able to do also, though he may go a different way about it.

  Samuel Butler

  Airplane, Men, Flying

  Samuel Butler (1951). “Notebooks”

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• Most organisms either adapt and become part of the system, or get wiped out. The only thing we have to adapt to the system with is our brain. If we don't use it, and we don't adapt fast enough, we won't survive.

  George Lucas

  Brain, Use, Enough

  "Cinematic Phenomenon". Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 19, 1999.

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• Most people believe that aging is universal but there are biological organisms that never age.

  Deepak Chopra

  Believe, People, Age

  Source: www.peopleandpossibilities.com

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• You've a very important, early decision to make in your life: are you going to be alone, or are you going to be with somebody else? Are you going to be sane, or not lonely? A couple is a strange thing; it's an organism that's half as intelligent as the most intelligent member. And you both know who it is!

  Dylan Moran

  Funny, Lonely, Couple

  "Dylan Moran: What It Is". Video, 2009.

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• If you look into the way that materials are used in an ecological system you'll notice that you'll find that there is no waste. The waste of one organism becomes food for another and everything's recycled in an ecological system whereas in our human built environment there's a throughput system. We use something then we throw it away... We have to imitate nature and try to re-use everything we make as human beings or recycle them - when we cannot re-use or recycle them we should try to reintegrate them back into the natural environment.

  Ken Yeang

  Trying, Looks, Use

  "Q&A: Ken Yeang interview". CNN Interview, www.cnn.com. July 20, 2007.

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• "Nothing is ever lost" means that what we are now goes all the way back through natural history. We are biological organisms and not simply computerized brains. By focusing totally on the present, thinking only about science and computers, and forgetting four billion years of life on this planet, we are losing perspective on who and what we are.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Mean, Thinking, Years

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• The living environment is the biosphere, the thin layer around the world of living organisms. We're part of that. Our existence is dependent on it in ways that people haven't even begun to appreciate. Our existence depends not just on its existence, but its stability and its richness.

  E. O. Wilson

  People, Appreciate, World

  Source: blog.cleveland.com

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• We don't even know what species are out there, for the most part, particularly when you get down to the microbes and very small invertebrates. They make up the mass of the organisms around us, including the soil we depend on, the soil of cornfields as well as hardwood forests. We haven't taken ecology to the point where we can even make a crude prediction of what's going to happen when we've reduced the living world down to a certain level.

  E. O. Wilson

  Taken, Levels, Soil

  Source: blog.cleveland.com

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• When you drive to the grocery store, your intention is not to change the world, it just happens to have that impact. So we've done a lot of things without even realizing it, and yes, just being unusual, as you say, does not put you above, in a sense, any of the other organisms with whom we share this planet.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Impact, Doe, Done

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Homeopathy did not merely seek to cure a disease but treated a disease as a sign of disorder of the whole human organism. This was also recognized in the Upanishad which spoke of human organs as combination of body mind and spirit. Homoeopathy would pay an important part in the Public Health of the country along with other systems. Medical facilities in India are so scanty that Homoeopathy can confidently visualize a vast field of expansion.

  Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

  Country, Mind, Important

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• I am a hopeless materialist. I see the soul as nothing else than the sim of activities of the organism plus personal habits - plus inherited habits, memories, experiences, of the organism. I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.

  Jack London

  Memories, Believe, Soul

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• The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive — a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society — a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.... The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, Zombie, Doe

  "The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z".

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• To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.

  Marcel Proust

  Suffering, Needs, States

  Marcel Proust (2006). “Remembrance of Things Past”, p.1127, Wordsworth Editions

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