Plant Quotes - Page 12

• A man is born gentle and weak. At death, he is hard and stiff. Green plants are tender and filled with sap. At death, they are withered and dry. Therefore, the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death, and the gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.

  Laozi

  Motivational, Fitness, Health

  Laozi (1997). “道德经”, Vintage

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• To call ourselves a Microcosme, or little world, I thought it onely a pleasant trope of Rhetorick, till my neare judgement and second thoughts told me there was a reall truth therein: for first wee are a rude masse, and in the ranke of creatures, which only are, and have a dull kinde of being not yet priviledged with life, or preferred to sense or reason; next we live the life of plants, the life of animals, the life of men, and at last the life of spirits, running on in one mysterious nature those five kinds of existence, which comprehend the creatures not onely of world, but of the Universe.

  Thomas Browne

  Running, Live Life, Animal

  4 Copy quote

• Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.

  Bill Bryson

  Oats, Wheat, Potatoes

  FaceBook post by Bill Bryson from Jul 05, 2016

  34 Copy quote

  Show source

• An infinity of these tiny animals defoliate our plants, our trees, our fruits... they attack our houses, our fabrics, our furniture, our clothing, our furs ... He who in studying all the different species of insects that are injurious to us, would seek means of preventing them from harming us, would seek to cause them to perish, proposes for his goal important tasks indeed.

  Rene Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur

  Mean, Science, Animal

  7 Copy quote

• t century, hundreds of millions - and eventually billions - of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet.

  Jeremy Rifkin

  Hydrogen, Energy, Peers

  "‘The Empathic Civilization’: Rethinking Human Nature in the Biosphere Era" by Jeremy Rifkin, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 18, 2010.

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• I like the strings. I always have. Because that's how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is, I think. We're not as frail as the strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me to you, helped me to imagine you as an actual person. But we're not different sprouts from the same plant. I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well – but never quite perfectly, you know?

  John Green

  Pain, Believe, Thinking

  John Green (2013). “Paper Towns”, p.301, A&C Black

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As soon as we touch the complex processes that go on in a living thing, be it plant or animal, we are at once forced to use the methods of this science [chemistry]. No longer will the microscope, the kymograph, the scalpel avail for the complete solution of the problem. For the further analysis of these phenomena which are in flux and flow, the investigator must associate himself with those who have labored in fields where molecules and atoms, rather than multicellular tissues or even unicellular organisms, are the units of study.

  John Jacob Abel

  Science, Animal, Atoms

  John Jacob Abel, Otto Folin, Theobald Smith (1915). “Experimental and chemical studies of the blood: with an appeal for more extended chemical training for the biological and medical investigator”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I want to be reborn as a tree; that way I can plant my roots down, never move and can never be separated from the ones I love.

  Son Eun-seo

  Drama, Moving, Roots

  7 Copy quote

• It had been held that the economic system, any capitalist system, found its equilibrium at full employment. Left to itself, it was thus that it came to rest. Idle men and idle plant were an aberration, a wholly temporary failing. Keynes showed that the modern economy could as well find its equilibrium with continuing, serious unemployment. Its perfectly normal tendency was to what economists have since come to call an underemployment equilibrium.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Men, Perfectly Normal, Aberration

  John Kenneth Galbraith (2001). “The Essential Galbraith”, p.234, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We can in fact only define a weed, mutatis mutandis, in terms of the well-known definition of dirt - as matter out of place. What we call a weed is in fact merely a plant growing where we do not want it.

  Edward James Salisbury

  Weed, Plants Growing, Definitions

  8 Copy quote

• Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power.

  Milton Friedman

  Mind, Concentration, Threat

  Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.2, University of Chicago Press

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• You cannot affirm the power plant and condemn the smokestack, or affirm the smoke and condemn the cough

  Wendell Berry

  Rivers, Environmental, Affirmation

  6 Copy quote

• These are little packets of light and you need to plant them early in the year and remember to mark where they were because lots of times they look like weeds in the beginning and it's not until later that you see how beautiful they really are.

  Brian Andreas

  Inspirational, Beautiful, Weed

  12 Copy quote

• Orpheus with his lute made trees, And the mountain tops that freeze, Bow themselves, when he did sing; To his music, plants and flowers Ever sprung; as sun and showers There had made a lasting spring. Every thing that heard him play, Even the billows of the sea, Hung their heads, and then lay by. In sweet music is such art, Killing care and grief of heart Fall asleep, or hearing, die.

  William Shakespeare

  Sweet, Art, Spring

  'Henry VIII' (1613) act 3, sc. 1, l. 3

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you are a garden plant you are regarded; well regarded, just as long as you stay in the garden.

  Davies Gilbert

  Weed, Garden, Long

  45 Copy quote

• Plants with leaves no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous bacteria could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.

  K. Eric Drexler

  Real, Cells, Dust

  K. Eric Drexler (1986). “Engines of creation”, Anchor Books

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.

  Arnold J. Toynbee

  Animal, Cynical, Population

  11 Copy quote

• Vain vision! when the changing world each day Sees some such lordly pleasance pass away; When the mere stripling knows my symbols all Worn tokes, heaven hypothetical, Nature indifferent, and the dreams of men Figments of longing which we must condemn. Yet keep these plants, O Man! a kinder time May yet be moved by them to better rhyme, Or moved, like me, to place his pleasure low, On the firm Earth, whence Men and Blossoms grow.

  Ruth Pitter

  Death, Dream, Men

  6 Copy quote

• A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.

  Aldo Leopold

  Rivers, Broken, Sun

  54 Copy quote

• The radiation of radium was "contagious"-Contagious like a persistent scent or a disease. It was impossible for an object, a plant, an animal or a person to be left near a tube of radium without immediately acquiring a notable "activity" which a sensitive apparatus could detect.

  Eve Curie

  Science, Animal, Scent

  8 Copy quote

• The diligent farmer plants trees, of which he himself will never see the fruit.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Agriculture, Tree, Fruit

  "Tusculanarum Disputationum". Book by Marcus Tullius Cicero (Book I, Chapter 14), translated, 45 BC.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Love, Morning, Growing Up

  Friedrich Nietzsche, Maudemarie Clark, Brian Leiter (1997). “Nietzsche: Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality”, p.171, Cambridge University Press

  102 Copy quote

  Show source

• Had I managed to fall into some sort of carnivorous plant? Yeah, bleed on the man-eating plant. Always a good plan.

  Diana Rowland

  Fall, Men, Eating

  Diana Rowland (2012). “Touch of the Demon: Demon Novels, Book Five”, p.58, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.

  George Perkins Marsh

  Nature, Men, Feet

  George Perkins Marsh (1864). “Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action”, p.36, New York : C. Scribner

  32 Copy quote

  Show source

• Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we're eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them. Cooks have their ways of saying grace too... Cooking something thoughtfully is a way to celebrate both that species and our relation to it.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, People, Grace

  4 Copy quote