Organisms Quotes - Page 9

• After a geological epoch passed in which single-celled organisms evolved into talk show hosts, Mr. Coffee was still holding out on me.

  Darynda Jones

  Coffee, Host, Shows

  Darynda Jones (2011). “First Grave on the Right”, p.5, Macmillan

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• Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation.

  Alan Watts

  Cutting, Men, Survival

  Alan W. Watts, Daniel Pinchbeck (2013). “The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness”, p.4, New World Library

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• If there really is a complete unified theory that governs everything, it presumably also determines your actions. But it does so in a way that is impossible to calculate for an organism that is as complicated as a human being. The reason we say that humans have free will is because we can't predict what they will do.

  Stephen Hawking

  Doe, Way, Action

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• Meat is necessary when there is hard physical work to be done, or in a very cold climate, or when edible plants cannot be found...Animal flesh provides all the substances we need, both for the intensive working of our organism and for maintaining a normal temperature in cold climates.

  G. I. Gurdjieff

  Animal, Normal, Meat

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• Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numberous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.

  Bill Bryson

  Stars, Names, Numbers

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• We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.

  Charles Darwin

  Stars, Self, Heaven

  Charles Darwin (2015). “Darwin on Evolution: Words of Wisdom from the Father of Evolution”, p.8, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• We are here because over billions of years, countless variables fell into place, any of which could have taken another path. We are essentially a beautiful fluke, as are the millions of other species with which we share this planet. Our cells are composed of atoms and dust particles from distant galaxies, and from the billions of living organisms that inhabited this planet before us.

  Wendy Mass

  Beautiful, Taken, Cells

  Wendy Mass (2010). “Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life”, p.109, Hachette UK

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• Never forget that the universe is a single living organism possessed of one substance and one soul, holding all things suspended in a single consciousness and creating all things with a single purpose that they might work together spinning and weaving and knotting whatever comes to pass.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Creating, Soul, Together

  Marcus Aurelius, C. Scot Hicks, David Hicks (2002). “The Emperor's Handbook: A New Translation of The Meditations”, p.49, Simon and Schuster

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• If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.

  Anthony Burgess

  Orange, Evil, Lovely

  Anthony Burgess (2011). “A Clockwork Orange”, p.13, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Every living organism is fulfilled when it follows the right path for its own nature.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Path, Fulfilled, Living Organisms

  Marcus Aurelius (2006). “Meditations”, p.119, Penguin UK

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• Hinduism is a living organism liable to growth and decay subject to the laws of Nature. One and indivisible at the root, it has grown into a vast tree with innumerable branches. The changes in the season affect it. It has its autumn and its summer, its winter and its spring. It is, and is not, based on scriptures. It does not derive its authority from one book. Non violence has found the highest expression and application in Hinduism.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Summer, Spring, Book

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• Ere long intelligence-transmitted without wires-will throb through the earth like a pulse through a living organism. The wonder is that, with the present state of knowledge and the experiences gained, no attempt is being made to disturb the electrostatic or magnetic condition of the earth, and transmit, if nothing else, intelligence.

  Nikola Tesla

  Knowledge, Science, Intelligent

  Nikola Tesla (2016). “Experiments with Alternate Currents of High Potential and High Frequency: [Illustrated & Biography Added]”, p.115, eKitap Projesi

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• By being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware.

  Barry Schuler

  Writing, Technology, Able

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• The nucleic acids, as constituents of living organisms, are comparable In importance to proteins. There is evidence that they are Involved In the processes of cell division and growth, that they participate In the transmission of hereditary characters, and that they are important constituents of viruses. An understanding of the molecular structure of the nucleic acids should be of value In the effort to understand the fundamental phenomena of life.

  Linus Pauling

  Life, Character, Science

  Linus Pauling, Barclay Kamb (2001). “Linus Pauling: Biomolecular sciences”, p.1123, World Scientific

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• Physical science enjoys the distinction of being the most fundamental of the experimental sciences, and its laws are obeyed universally, so far as is known, not merely by inanimate things, but also by living organisms, in their minutest parts, as single individuals, and also as whole communities. It results from this that, however complicated a series of phenomena may be and however many other sciences may enter into its complete presentation, the purely physical aspect, or the application of the known laws of matter and energy, can always be legitimately separated from the other aspects.

  Frederick Soddy

  Science, Law, Community

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• Darwin was one of our finest specimens. He did superbly what human beings are designed to do: manipulate social information to personal advantage. The information in question was the prevailing account of how human beings, and all organisms, came to exist; Darwin reshaped it in a way that radically raised his social status. When he died in 1882, his greatness was acclaimed in newspapers around the world, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey, not far from the body of Isaac Newton. Alpha-male territory.

  Robert Wright

  Greatness, Territory, Information

  Robert Wright (2010). “The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology”, p.377, Vintage

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• Seen in retrospect, evolution as a whole doubtless had a general direction, from simple to complex, from dependence on to relative independence of the environment, to greater and greater autonomy of individuals, greater and greater development of sense organs and nervous systems conveying and processing information about the state of the organism's surroundings, and finally greater and greater consciousness. You can call this direction progress or by some other name.

  Theodosius Dobzhansky

  Simple, Names, Independence

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• Think of it : zillions and zillions of organisms running around, each under the hypnotic spell of a single truth, all these truths identical, and all logically incompatible with one another : 'My hereditary material is the most important material on earth; its survival justifies your frustration, pain, even death'. And you are one of those organisms, living your life in the thrall of a logical absurdity.

  Robert Wright

  Running, Pain, Frustration

  Robert Wright (2010). “The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology”, p.440, Vintage

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• Neo-Darwinian language and conceptual structure itself ensures scientific failure: Major questions posed by zoologists cannot be answered from inside the neo-Darwinian straitjacket. Such questions include, for example, 'How do new structures arise in evolution?' 'Why, given so much environmental change, is stasis so prevalent in evolution as seen in the fossil record?' 'How did one group of organisms or set of macromolecules evolve from another?' The importance of these questions is not at issue; it is just that neo-Darwinians, restricted by their resuppositions, cannot answer them.

  Lynn Margulis

  Issues, Environmental, Groups

  Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan (2013). “Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution”, p.100, Springer Science & Business Media

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• One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is impossible. Yet here we are-as a result, I believe, of spontaneous generation.

  George Wald

  Believe, Tasks, Generations

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• Most of us have no sympathy with the rich idler who spends his life in pleasure without ever doing any work. But even he fulfills a function in the life of the social organism. He sets an example of luxury that awakens in the multitude a consciousness of new needs and gives industry the incentive to fulfill them.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Luxury, Giving, Example

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• It has occurred to me that possibly the white corpuscles may have the office of picking up and digesting bacterial organisms when by any means they find their way into the blood. The propensity exhibited by the leukocytes for picking up inorganic granules is well known, and that they may be able not only to pick up but to assimilate, and so dispose of, the bacteria which come in their way does not seem to me very improbable in view of the fact that amoebae, which resemble them so closely, feed upon bacteria and similar organisms.

  George Miller Sternberg

  Mean, Science, White

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• Perhaps bacteria may tentatively be regarded as biochemical experiments; owing to their relatively small size and rapid growth, variations must arise much more frequently than in more differentiated forms of life, and they can in addition afford to occupy more precarious positions in natural economy than larger organisms with more exacting requirements.

  Marjory Stephenson

  Science, Growth, Variation

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• A cell of a higher organism contains a thousand different substances, arranged in a complex system. This great organized system was not discovered by chemical or physical methods; they are inadequate to its refinement and delicacy and complexity.

  Herbert Spencer Jennings

  Cells, Substance, Delicacy

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• The cell, this elementary keystone of living nature, is far from being a peculiar chemical giant molecule or even a living protein and as such is not likely to fall prey to the field of an advanced chemistry. The cell is itself an organism, constituted of many small units of life.

  Oscar Hertwig

  Life, Fall, Science

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