Organisms Quotes - Page 3

• Music acts on the whole of the organism like a magic force which suppresses the understanding and irresistibly takes possession of the entire being. To insist on analysing this force is to destroy its very essence.

  Emile Jaques-Dalcroze

  Music, Art, Essence

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• The economy is a very sensitive organism.

  Hjalmar Schacht

  Finance, Sensitive, Economy

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• The most serious disorders may be provoked by the injection of living organisms into the blood, into a medium not intended for them, may provoke redoubtable manifestations of the gravest morbid phenomena.

  Antoine Bechamp

  May, Serious, Morbid

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• Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.

  Donna J. Haraway

  Self, Differences, Mind

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• I almost think that hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism. Where hope is lacking the soul dries up and withers.

  Gabriel Marcel

  Thinking, Breathing, Soul

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• By ecology we understand the total science of the connections of the organism to the surrounding external world.

  Ernst Haeckel

  Connections, World, Ecology

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• I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it.

  Michael Behe

  Ideas, Doubt, Common

  "Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution". Book by Michael Behe, 1996.

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• Nature first, then theory. Or, better, Nature and theory closely intertwined while you throw all your intellectual capital at the subject. Love the organisms for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and, with good fortune, discoveries will follow. If they don't, the love and the pleasure will have been enough.

  E. O. Wilson

  Discovery, Intellectual, Firsts

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• People are not the only interesting organism on earth. From the point of view of scientific or commercial value, there are lots of interesting organisms.

  Daniel Nathans

  Views, People, Interesting

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• It is impossible for us to understand the Church if we regard her as subject to the limitations of human culture. For she is essentially a supernatural organism which transcends human cultures and transforms them to her own ends.

  Christopher Dawson

  Church, Culture, Literature

  Christopher Dawson, Gerald J. Russello (1998). “Christianity and European Culture (Selections from the Work of Christopher Dawson)”, p.101, CUA Press

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• Most of us can learn to live in perfect comfort on higher levels of power. Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. It is evident that our organism has stored-up reserves of energy that are ordinarily not called upon - deeper and deeper strata of explosible material, ready for use by anyone who probes so deep. The human individual usually lives far within his limits.

  William James

  Life, Power, Perfect

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• The world we inhabit is abundant beyond our wildest imagination. There are trees, dreams, sunrises; there are thunderstorms, shadows, rivers; there are wars, flea bites, love affairs; there are the lives of people, Gods, entire galaxies. The simplest human action varies from one person and occasion to the next-how else would we recognize our friends only from their gait, posture, voice, and divine their changing moods? Only a tiny fraction of this abundance affects our minds. This is a blessing, not a drawback.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Dream, War, Blessing

  "Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Richness of Being".

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• Stimuli, however, do not act upon an indifferent organism.

  Jerome Bruner

  Stimulus, Indifferent

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• But when it has been shown by the researches of Pasteur that the septic property of the atmosphere depended not on the oxygen, or any gaseous constituent, but on minute organisms suspended in it, which owed their energy to their vitality, it occurred to me that decomposition in the injured part might be avoided without excluding the air, by applying as a dressing some material capable of destroying the life of the floating particles. Upon this principle I have based a practice.

  Joseph Lister

  Science, Air, Oxygen

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• Therapeutic fasting is not a mystical or magical cure. It works because the body has within it the capacity to heal when the obstacles to healing are removed. Health is the normal state. Most chronic disease is the inevitable consequence of living a life-style that places disease-causing stressors on the human organism. Fasting gives the body an interlude without those stressors so that it can speedily repair or accomplish healing that could not otherwise occur in the feeding state.

  Joel Fuhrman

  Healing, Giving, Style

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• Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.

  C. S. Lewis

  Animal, Emotion, Aids

  C. S. LEWIS (1947). “THE ABOLITION OF MAN”

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• Desired substance, things, patterns, or sequences of experience that are in some sense "good" for the organism - items of diet, conditions of life, temperature, entertainment, sex, and so forth - are never such that more of the something is always better than less of the something. Rather, for all objects and experiences, there is a quantity that has optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived.

  Gregory Bateson

  Sex, Fall, Simplicity

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• Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.

  Ezra Pound

  Men, Simplicity, Simple Life

  1938 Guide to Kulcher, pt.3, section 5, ch.19.

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• According to the concept of transformational evolution, first clearly articulated by Lamarck, evolution consists of the gradual transformation of organisms from one condition of existence to another.

  Ernst Mayr

  Firsts, Evolution, Transformation

  "The Dynamics of Evolution: The Punctuated Equilibrium Debate in the Natural and Social Sciences". Book by Albert Somit and Steven Peterson, p. 21-48, "Speciational Evolution or Punctuated Equilibria", 1992.

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• Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, should we know better?

  Peter Cheeke

  Writing, Essence, Ideas

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• The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.

  Jeremy Rifkin

  Gmos, Environmental, Introducing

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• The three branches of government number considerably more than three and are not, in any sense, 'branches' since that would imply that there is something they are all attached to besides self-aggrandizement and our pocketbooks. ... Government is not a machine with parts; it's an organism. When does an intestine quit being an intestine and start becoming an asshole?

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Government, Self, Numbers

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• Ranganathan's 5 Laws: Books are for use. Books are for all. Every book its reader, or every reader his book. Save the time of the reader. A library is a growing organism.

  S. R. Ranganathan

  Book, Law, Library

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• It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

  George Eliot

  World, Demand, Fine

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.2858, Delphi Classics

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• The absorption of oxygen and the elimination of carbon dioxide in the lungs take place by diffusion alone. There is no trustworthy evidence of any regulation of this process on the part of the organism.

  August Krogh

  Science, Oxygen, Regulation

  August Krogh (1977). “Respiratory adaptations, capillary exchange, and reflex mechanisms: proceedings of the August Krogh Centenary Symposium held in Srinagar, Kashmir (India), October 11-15, 1974”

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