Living Things Quotes - Page 10

• One must believe that every living thing whatsoever must change insensibly in its organization and in its form... One must therefore never expect to find among living species all those which are found in the fossil state, and yet one may not assume that any species has really been lost or rendered extinct.

  Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

  Believe, Science, Organization

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• The generation of seeds ... is therefore marvelous and analogous to the other productions of living things. For first of all an umbilicus appears. ... Its extremity gradually expands and after gathering a colliquamentous ichor becomes analogous to an amnion. ... In the course of time the seed or fetus begins to become visible.

  Marcello Malpighi

  Life, Science, Generations

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• Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.

  Thomas Huxley

  Life, Science, Equilibrium

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1872). “Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews”, p.73

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• About two million years ago, man appeared. He has become the dominant species on the earth. All other living things, animal and plant, live by his sufferance. He is the custodian of life on earth, and in the solar system. It's a big responsibility.

  George Wald

  Life, Responsibility, Science

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• A lodestone is a wonderful thing in very many experiments, and like living things. And one of its remarkable virtues in that which the ancients considered to be a living soul in the sky, in the globes and in the stars, in the sun and in the moon.

  William Gilbert

  Life, Stars, Science

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• I think there will come a time when civilized people will look back in horror on our generation and the ones that have preceded it; the idea that we should eat other living things running around on four legs, that we should raise them just for the purpose of killing them! The people of the future will say 'meat-eaters' in disgust and regard us in the same way that we regard cannibals and cannibalism.

  Dennis Weaver

  Running, Animal, Thinking

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• The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own traveling brotherhood.

  Freya Stark

  Life, Change, Art

  Freya Stark (2013). “Perseus In The Wind: A Life of Travel”, p.110, Tauris Parke Paperbacks

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• Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things.

  William Golding

  Life, Moving, Fall

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  The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.

  Marya Mannes

  Revenge, Abuse, Environmental

  Marya Mannes (1958). “More in Anger”

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• True wealth is not a static thing. It is a living thing made out of the disposition of men to create and distribute the good things of life with rising standards of living.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Money, Men, Rising

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• There was a magic about the sea. People were drawn to it. People wanted to love by it, swim in it, play in it, look at it. It was a living thing that was as unpredictable as a great stage actor: it could be calm and welcoming, opening its arms to embrace it's audience one moment, but then could explode with its stormy tempers, flinging people around, wanting them out, attacking coastlines, breaking down islands.

  Cecelia Ahern

  Ocean, Islands, Sea

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• Nature has but one plan of operation, invariably the same in the smallest things as well as in the largest, and so often do we see the smallest masses selected for use in Nature, that even enormous ones are built up solely by fitting these together. Indeed, all Nature's efforts are devoted to uniting the smallest parts of our bodies in such a way that all things whatsoever, however diverse they may be, which coalesce in the structure of living things construct the parts by means of a sort of compendium.

  Marcello Malpighi

  Nature, Mean, Science

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• Is it too late to prevent us from self-destructing? No, for we have the capacity to design our own future, to take a lesson from living things around us and bring our values and actions in line with ecological necessity. But we must first realize that ecological and social and economic issues are all deeply intertwined. There can be no solution to one without a solution to the others.

  Jean-Michel Cousteau

  Future, Self, Issues

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• When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

  Cyril Connolly

  Men, Years, Garbage Cans

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• I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included

  Adrienne Rich

  Children, Believe, Bad Ass

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.44, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death.

  Joseph de Maistre

  Life, Death, Sacrifice

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• Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

  John Stuart Mill

  Gymnastics, Justice, Diversity

  John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, John Troyer (2003). “The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill”, p.196, Hackett Publishing

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• The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.

  William Beebe

  Art, Inspiration, Hard Work

  "The Bird: Its Form and Function". Book by William Beebe, 1906.

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• All was forgiven. All living things were brothers, and all dead things were even more so.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Brother, Forgiven

  Kurt Vonnegut (1970). “The Sirens of Titan: An Original Novel”, New York : Dell

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• Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly.

  Gretel Ehrlich

  Love Life, Animal, Land

  Gretel Ehrlich (2010). “The Future of Ice: A Journey Into Cold”, p.197, Vintage

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• What's important is that a story changes every time you say it out loud. When you put it on paper, it can never change. But the more times you tell it, the more changes will occur. A story is a living thing; it moves and shifts

  Pat Conroy

  Moving, Important, Stories

  Pat Conroy (2010). “South of Broad”, p.260, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Kindness and compassion towards all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Conversely, cruelty, whether it is directed against human beings or against animals, is not the exclusive province of any one culture or community of people.

  Cesar Chavez

  Kindness, Animal, Compassion

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• A story is a living thing, it moves and shifts.

  Pat Conroy

  Moving, Stories

  Pat Conroy (2010). “South of Broad”, p.260, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Life is dear to every living thing; the worm that crawls upon the ground will struggle for it.

  Solomon Northup

  Struggle, Life Is, Worms

  Solomon Northup, Harriet Beecher Stowe (2014). “Twelve Years A Slave: illustrated Original Edition With Bonus of Uncle Tom's Cabin”, p.71, Ageless Reads

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• Basic characteristics of an individual organism: to divide, to unite, to merge into the universal, to abide in the particular, to transform itself, to define itself, and as living things tend to appear under a thousand conditions, to arise and vanish, to solidify and melt, to freeze and flow, to expand and contract. Since these effects occur together, any or all may occur at the same moment.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Life, Science, Together

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