Quotes About Body

Of every 200 atoms in your body, 126 are hydrogen, 51 are oxygen, and just 19 are carbon32.fn3

Somebody needs to explain to me why it is that the one thing your body can suddenly do well when you get old is grow hair in your nose and ears. It's like God is playing a terrible, cruel joke on you, as if he is saying, "Well, Bill, the bad news is that from now on you are going to be barely continent, lose your faculties one by one, and have sex about once every lunar eclipse, but the good news is that you can braid your nostrils.

throw down your throat and how much of your life is spent sprawled in a near-vegetative state in front of a glowing screen. Yet in some kind and miraculous way our bodies look after us, extract nutrients from the miscellaneous foodstuffs we push into our faces, and somehow hold us together, generally at a pretty high level, for decades. Suicide by lifestyle takes ages.

You discard about a hundred billion red blood cells every day. They are a big component of what makes your stools brown.

You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 × 1018 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.

Each one carries a copy of the complete genetic code—the instruction manual for your body—so it knows not only how to do its job but every other job in the body.

The genome, as Eric Lander of MIT has put it, is like a parts list for the human body: it tells us what we are made of, but says nothing about how we work.

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What it comes down to really is cancer is, appallingly, your own body doing its best to kill you. It is suicide without permission.

Adults in the West produce about 200 grams of feces a day—a little under half a pound, about 180 pounds a year, 14,000 pounds in a lifetime.

The question is important because if fever is a defense mechanism, then any effort to suppress or eliminate it may be counterproductive. Allowing a fever to run its course (within limits, needless to say) could be the wisest thing. An increase of only a degree or so in body temperature has been shown to slow the replication rate of viruses by a factor of two hundred—an astonishing increase in self-defense from only a very modest rise in warmth.

What genes specifically do is provide instructions for building proteins. Most of the useful things in the body are proteins. Some speed up chemical changes and are known as enzymes. Others convey chemical messages and are known as hormones.

As Jablonski has written, "The loss of most of our body hair and the gain of the ability to dissipate excess body heat through eccrine sweating helped to make possible the dramatic enlargement of our most temperature-sensitive organ, the brain." That, she says, is how sweat helped to make you brainy.

There is perhaps a kind of strange double comfort in knowing that you will almost certainly never lose your uvula but that it wouldn't matter too much anyway if you did.

DNA passes on information with extraordinary fidelity. It makes only about one error per every billion letters copied. Still, because your cells divide so much, that is about three errors, or mutations, per cell division. Most of those mutations the body can ignore, but just occasionally they have lasting significance. That is evolution.

Thirst, curiously, is not a reliable indication of how much water you need. People allowed to drink all the water they want after getting very thirsty usually report feeling slaked after drinking only one-fifth the amount they have lost through perspiration.

if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto.

Cadmium, for instance, is the twenty-third most common element in the body, constituting 0.1 percent of your bulk, but it is seriously toxic.

The physical language of the body is so much more powerful than words.

New Rule: Any tattoo that has more than one line is too long.

I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.

Power rules the world, not opinion, but it is opinion that exploits power. It is power that makes opinion. To be easygoing can be a fine thing according to our opinion. Why? Because anyone who wants to dance the tightrope will be alone, and I can get together a stronger body of people to say there is nothing fine about it.

Where then is this self, if it is neither in the body nor the soul? And how can one love the body or the soul except for the sake of such qualities, which are not what makes up the self, since they are perishable? Would we love the substance of a person's soul, in the abstract, whatever qualities might be in it? That is not possible, and it would be wrong. Therefore we never love anyone, but only qualities.

The infinite distance between body and mind symbolizes the infinitely more infinite distance between mind and charity, for charity is supernatural. ...Out of all bodies together we could not succeed in creating one little thought. It is impossible, and of a different order. Out of all bodies and minds we could not extract one impulse of true charity. It is impossible, and of a different, supernatural, order.