Organs Quotes - Page 8

• Descriptive anatomy is to physiology what geography is to history, and just as it is not enough to know the typography of a country to understand its history, so also it is not enough to know the anatomy of organs to understand their functions.

  Claude Bernard

  Country, Anatomy And Physiology, Typography

  Claude Bernard (1974). “Lectures on the phenomena of life common to animals and plants”, Charles C Thomas Pub Ltd

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• It is not the organs-that is, the character and form of the animal's bodily parts-that have given rise to its habits and particular structures. It is the habits and manner of life and the conditions in which its ancestors lived that have in the course of time fashioned its bodily form, its organs and qualities.

  Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

  Character, Animal, Quality

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• All living organisms are but leaves on the same tree of life. The various functions of plants and animals and their specialized organs are manifestations of the same living matter. This adapts itself to different jobs and circumstances, but operates on the same basic principles. Muscle contraction is only one of these adaptations. In principle it would not matter whether we studied nerve, kidney or muscle to understand the basic principles of life. In practice, however, it matters a great deal.

  Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

  Life, Jobs, Science

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• I think if a physician wrote on a death certificate that old age was the cause of death, he'd be thrown out of the union. There is always some final event, some failure of an organ, some last attack of pneumonia, that finishes off a life. No one dies of old age.

  George Wald

  Life, Science, Thinking

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• Even the mind depends so much on temperament and the disposition of one's bodily organs that, if it is possible to find a way to make people generally more wise and more skilful than they have been in the past, I believe that we should look for it in medicine. It is true that medicine as it is currently practiced contains little of much use.

  Rene Descartes

  Wise, Believe, Science

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• The eye of the trilobite tells us that the sun shone on the old beach where he lived; for there is nothing in nature without a purpose, and when so complicated an organ was made to receive the light, there must have been light to enter it.

  Louis Agassiz

  Beach, Nature, Eye

  "Geological Sketches". Book by Louis Agassiz, ch. 2 (pp. 31 - 32), 1870.

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• It is in this mutual dependence of the functions and the aid which they reciprocally lend one another that are founded the laws which determine the relations of their organs and which possess a necessity equal to that of metaphysical or mathematical laws, since it is evident that the seemly harmony between organs which interact is a necessary condition of existence of the creature to which they belong and that if one of these functions were modified in a manner incompatible with the modifications of the others the creature could no longer continue to exist.

  Georges Cuvier

  Law, Harmony, Metaphysical

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• A man in twenty-four hours converts as much as seven ounces of carbon into carbonic acid; a milch cow will convert seventy ounces, and a horse seventy-nine ounces, solely by the act of respiration. That is, the horse in twenty-four hours burns seventy-nine ounces of charcoal, or carbon, in his organs of respiration to supply his natural warmth in that time ..., not in a free state, but in a state of combination.

  Michael Faraday

  Horse, Men, Twenties

  Michael Faraday, Hermann L. F. Von Helmholtz (2010). “Scientific Papers: Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, Geology”, p.175, Cosimo, Inc.

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• We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.

  Sarah Waters

  Names, Indulge Yourself, Literature

  Sarah Waters (2002). “Fingersmith”, p.447, Penguin

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• The human brain is a complex organ with the wonderful power of enabling man to find reasons for continuing to believe whatever it is that he wants to believe.

  Voltaire

  Believe, Men, Brain

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• He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending to be whole.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Men, Age, Bottles

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• In order to understand what is meant by the word 'brain' as it is used by neuroscientists, we must bear in mind the evidence that this organ contains in some recorded form the basis of one's whole conscious life. It contains the record of all our aims and ambitions and is essential for the experience of all pleasures and pains, all loves and hates.

  John Zachary Young

  Pain, Hate, Ambition

  John Zachary Young (1987). “Philosophy and the brain”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• The linden, in the fervors of July,
  Hums with a louder concert. When the wind
  Sweeps the broad forest in its summer prime,
  As when some master-hand exulting sweeps
  The keys of some great organ, ye give forth
  The music of the woodland depths, a hymn
  Of gladness and of thanks.

  William C. Bryant

  Summer, Keys, July

  William Cullen Bryant, “Among The Trees”

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• A function to each organ, and each organ to its own function, is the law of all organization.

  Herbert Spencer

  Science, Law, Organization

  Herbert Spencer (1873). “Social Statics; Or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, & the First of Them Developed”, p.301

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• Prayer is the highest form, the supreme act of the Creative Imagination. ... For prayer is not a request for something: it is the expression of a mode of being, a means of existing and of causing to exist, ... The organ of Prayer is the heart, the psychospiritual organ, with its concentration of energy, its himma. ... Prayer is a "creator" of vision, ... .

  Henry Corbin

  Prayer, Heart, Mean

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• What if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled, and youth would find no room on earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous. In the midst of death life renews itself immortally.

  Will Durant

  Strong, Struggle, Thinking

  "Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God".

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• A broken heart is such a shabby thing, like poverty and failure and the incurable diseases which are also deforming. I hate it and am ashamed of it, and I must somehow repair this heart and put it back into its normal condition, as a tough somewhat scarred but operating organ.

  Martha Gellhorn

  Broken Heart, Hate, Disease

  Martha Gellhorn, Caroline Moorehead (2006). “The letters of Martha Gellhorn”, Vintage

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• It isn't the height that scares me - the height makes me feel alive with energy, every organ and vessel and muscle in my body singing at the same pitch. Then I realize what it is. It's him. Something about him makes me feel like I am about to fall. Or turn to liquid. Or burst into flames.

  Veronica Roth

  Fall, Flames, Singing

  Veronica Roth (2013). “The Divergent Series Complete Collection: Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant”, p.70, Harper Collins

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• His absence will haunt their hallways, and he will be a space they can't fill. And then time will pass, and the hole will be gone, like when an organ is removed and the body's fluids flow into the space it leaves. Humans can't tolerate emptiness for long.

  Veronica Roth

  Space, Long, Gone

  Veronica Roth (2014). “Divergent Collector's Edition”, p.25, Harper Collins

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• Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.

  Kevin Kelly

  Technology, Humans

  Kevin Kelly (2010). “What Technology Wants”, p.268, Penguin

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• I'm going to eviscerate you and leave your organs on a pike in the yard as a warning to those who wear large jewelry.

  Libba Bray

  Yards, Warning, Jewelry

  Libba Bray (2015). “The Gemma Doyle Trilogy”, p.135, Delacorte Press

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• On my license, it says I'm an organ donor, but the truth is I'd consider being an organ martyr. I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive - the sum of the parts equal more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart.

  Jodi Picoult

  Heart, Wind, Alive

  Jodi Picoult (2009). “My Sister's Keeper: A Novel”, p.112, Simon and Schuster

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• Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashipn the theme of Iluvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Echoes, Voice, Dwelling

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• The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.

  John Green

  Math, People, Brain

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• He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate - they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.

  Stephen King

  Lonely, Hunting, Cells

  Stephen King (2008). “The Stand”, p.280, Anchor

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