Quotes About Symbiosis

The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer

We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.

Anger and humour are like the left and right arm. They complement each other.

All species capable of grasping this fact manage better in the struggle for existence than those which rely upon their own strength alone: the wolf, which hunts in a pack, has a greater chance of survival than the lion, which hunts alone.

She and Jon had been startled and a little frighented by his misery. What happened when you were married, she realized, was that, although you began as two independent people, you eventually grew in certain ways to accommodate your partner's weaknesses and let other parts of you atrophy in deference to his strengths. It was a fine system as long as it endured, but if you extricated yourself from it you couldn't help but be, a least for a time, deformed.

The dog gave the meat to the ass and the ass gave hay to the dog and both went hungry

For example, typhus was initially transmitted between rats by rat fleas, which sufficed for a while to transfer typhus from rats to humans. Eventually, typhus microbes discovered that human body lice offered a much more efficient method of traveling directly between humans. Now that Americans have mostly deloused themselves, typhus has discovered a new route into us: by infecting eastern North American flying squirrels and then transferring to people whose attics harbor flying squirrels.

Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I'm free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon's wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know.

We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours.

There are literally as many ideas as there are organisms.

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

We don't experience our professional and personal lives as separate worlds; they are intertwined and holistic.

The soil needs the seed, and the seed needs the soil. The one only has meaning with the other.

Art and commerce are not irreconciliable, they are inextricably intertwined.

This is fusion, when two people become one. They are so close and so well suited to each other that they blend together. They merge and can't live without each other after that.

The Earth is an animal that shakes off its fleas when they dig too deep, bite too hard.

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labor, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.

We are the white-eyed, the red-eyed, the eyeless, with full wings, with crumpled vestigial wings. We perceive the buzz of fluorescence you call quiet, its flicker you call light. The chemical stream of your midafternoon banana sings behind our mouthparts. We are the tested.

Plugging into a tree is like being plugged into the Sun.

And they are a part of you. And with Viva it sometimes felt like we were continuations of the same person, that I began where she ended, and vice versa.

Symbiosis can fail in various different ways: if there's too much stomach bacteria in my stomach, I might have some problems. If there's too little, I might have some problems. There's a sort of dynamic system there.

Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?

So it was necessary to work, to maintain a semblance of economic organization in the nation, to guarantee, despite the destruction and the pillaging, a level of activity. Unfortunately, the least action served the purposes of the enemy who was slaughtering us, attaching his suckers to our skin and living in symbiosis with us.

Harvard biologist and entomologist E. O. Wilson's coined term "Biofilia," by which he means the emotional affiliation humans feel toward other living organisms