Organisms Quotes - Page 3

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

  Kevin Kelly

  Past, Organization, Literature

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• 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

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

  Kevin Kelly

  Environment

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

  Kevin Kelly

  Environment, Broads

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• 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

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• If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.

  William James

  Sick, Failing, Ifs

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

  Walter Gilbert

  World, Embedded, Related

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• 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

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• Humans have certain properties and characteristics which are intrinsic to them, just as every other organism does. That's human nature.

  Noam Chomsky

  Doe, Human Nature, Characteristics

  "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media", www.imdb.com. 1992.

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

  Jerry Saltz

  Hate, Events, Giants

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• 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

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• An organism at war with itself is doomed.

  Carl Sagan

  War, Doomed

  "Cosmos". TV Mini-Series, www.imdb.com. 1980.

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• Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.

  Bill Bryson

  Ambitious, Earth, Visible

  Bill Bryson (2014). “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, p.308, Lulu Press, Inc

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• The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.

  George Orwell

  Cells, Weariness

  George Orwell (1976). “The Penguin complete novels of George Orwell”

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• No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

  Shirley Jackson

  Life, Reality, Long

  Shirley Jackson (2013). “The Haunting of Hill House”, p.34, Penguin

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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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• By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.

  Donna J. Haraway

  Machines, Century, Chimera

  "Become Who You Are: The World’s First Legally Recognized Cyborg May Be Onto Something" by Priscilla Frank, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 20, 2015.

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• Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.

  Neal Stephenson

  Mean, Self, Issues

  Neal Stephenson (2009). “Cryptonomicon”, p.5, Harper Collins

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• 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”

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• 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

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• 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”

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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