Organisms Quotes - Page 2

• A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.

  Wallace Stegner

  Writing, Heart, Cutting

  6 Copy quote

• Another year is fast approaching. Go be that starving artist you’re afraid to be. Open up that journal and get poetic finally. Volunteer. Suck it up and travel. You were not born here to work and pay taxes. You were put here to be part of a vast organism to explore and create. Stop putting it off. The world has much more to offer than what’s on 15 televisions at TGI Fridays. Take pictures. Scare people. Shake up the scene. Be the change you want to see in the world.

  Jason Mraz

  Inspirational, Life, Friday

  51 Copy quote

• Just as blueprints don't necessarily specify blue buildings, selfish genes don't necessarily specify selfish organisms. As we shall see, sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain. Genes are a play within a play, not the interior monologue of the players.

  Steven Pinker

  Selfish, Player, Blue

  10 Copy quote

• No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

  Shirley Jackson

  Dream, Wall, Reality

  Shirley Jackson (2006). “The Haunting of Hill House”, p.19, Penguin

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• A farm includes the passion of the farmer's heart, the interest of the farm's customers, the biological activity in the soil, the pleasantness of the air about the farm -- it's everything touching, emanating from, and supplying that piece of landscape. A farm is virtually a living organism. The tragedy of our time is that cultural philosophies and market realities are squeezing life's vitality out of most farms. And that is why the average farmer is now 60 years old. Serfdom just doesn't attract the best and brightest.

  Joel Salatin

  Philosophy, Heart, Passion

  18 Copy quote

• There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Country, Philosophy, Book

  17 Copy quote

• I prefer to think of the audience as a single living organism with which I am sharing a singular, never-to-be-repeated experience.

  Martha Plimpton

  Thinking, Audience, Living Organisms

  4 Copy quote

• Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.

  Gore Vidal

  Thinking, Years, Numbers

  Gore Vidal (1991). “A view from the diners club: essays 1987-1991”

  26 Copy quote

  Show source

• Photosynthetic organisms in the sea yield most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, take up and store vast amounts of carbon dioxide, shape planetary chemistry, and hold the planet steady.

  Sylvia Earle

  Yield, Oxygen, Sea

  7 Copy quote

• We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us.

  Walter Gilbert

  World, Embedded, Related

  7 Copy quote

• I haven't a clue if there is life on other planets but I'd be charmed if we found a unicellular organism on Mars. It would change our whole concept of life on Earth.

  Tommy Lee Jones

  Mars, Earth, Clue

  13 Copy quote

• In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.

  Kevin Kelly

  Environment, Broads

  7 Copy quote

• Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms.

  Kevin Kelly

  Environment

  4 Copy quote

• One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.

  Kevin Kelly

  Organization, Function, Persist

  8 Copy quote

• The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

  Kevin Kelly

  Past, Organization, Literature

  8 Copy quote

• The chief condition on which, life, health and vigor depend on, is action. It is by action that an organism develops its faculties, increases its energy, and attains the fulfillment of its destiny.

  Colin Powell

  Business, Health, Destiny

  14 Copy quote

• Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops.

  Jeremy Rifkin

  Government, Gmos, United States

  24 Copy quote

• Giant group events are distorting organisms: You can like and hate them in rapid succession.

  Jerry Saltz

  Hate, Events, Giants

  4 Copy quote

• When people in stadiums do the Wave, it's the group-mind collective organism spontaneously organizing itself to express an emotion, pass time, and reflect the joy of seeing the rhythms of many as one, a visual rhyming or music in which everyone senses where the motion is going.

  Jerry Saltz

  People, Joy, Mind

  17 Copy quote

• Suspicion is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium.

  Nathalie Sarraute

  Morbid, Reactions, Equilibrium

  Nathalie Sarraute (1990). “The age of suspicion: essays on the novel”, George Braziller

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Brain, Body, May

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2016). “The Wisdom of Life”, p.19, Cosimo Classics

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every stress leaves an indelible scar, and the organism pays for its survival after a stressful situation by becoming a little older.

  Hans Selye

  Stress, Survival, Getting Older

  102 Copy quote

• I've always been more interested in organisms that can move on their own than in stationary plants. But when I canoe or hike along the edge of lakes or oceans and see trees that seem to be growing out of rock faces, I am blown away. How do they do it?

  David Suzuki

  Ocean, Moving, Lakes

  4 Copy quote

• We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.

  Lewis Thomas

  Party, Dna, Sea

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

  19 Copy quote

  Show source

• I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.

  Arnold J. Toynbee

  Believe, Civilization, Dies

  19 Copy quote