Organisms Quotes - Page 10

• 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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• A library is a growing organism.

  S. R. Ranganathan

  Library, Growing

  S. R. Ranganathan (1950). “Colon Classification”

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• Natural history is not equivalent to biology. Biology is the study of life. Natural history is the study of animals and plants-of organisms. Biology thus includes natural history, and much else besides.

  Marston Bates

  Science, Animal, Nomenclature

  Marston Bates (2014). “The Nature of Natural History”, p.7, Princeton University Press

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• Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.

  John Dos Passos

  Apathy, Complicated, Intense

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• Astrology's roots lie in an ancient world-view which perceived the universe as a single living organism, animated by divine order and intelligence.

  Liz Greene

  Lying, Views, Divine Order

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve.

  Joseph Campbell

  Children, Flower, Men

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• Statesmen think in terms of history and view society as an organism. Prophets are different since they believe absolute aims can be achieved in the foreseeable future. More people have been killed by crusaders than by statesmen.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Believe, Thinking, Views

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing it describes. Whenever the map is confused with the territory, a 'semantic disturbance' is set up in the organism. The disturbance continues until the limitation of the map is recognized.

  Alfred Korzybski

  Confused, Maps, Territory

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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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• 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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• 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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• "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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• 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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• 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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• The observation of others is coloured by our inability to observe ourselves impartially. We can never be impartial about anything until we can be impartial about our own organism.

  Alfred Richard Orage

  Perspective, Inability, Observation

  Alfred Richard Orage (1954). “Essays and aphorisms”

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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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