Quotes About Symbiosis

Eventually companion animals would be phased out, and we would return to a more symbiotic relationship - enjoyment at a distance.

The European rabbit flea is so synchronized with its host that a female flea only gestates when living on a pregnant doe; when the doe gives birth, so does the flea, and the new fleas find a happy home on the baby rabbit.

On the two-way street of communication, a happy symbiosis is achieved when a writer tosses up an offbeat usage or a puzzling word and the working reader figures it out and savors it.

intestinal flora and mitochondria share a complex interplay and are like second and third sets of DNA in addition to our own nuclear DNA.

Life thrives on life;

The Sun would have wasted its life but for the evolution of life on earth. The one who gives should be grateful to the one who receives.

Knowledge, Action and Devotion are complementary to each other.

nematode trapped by a single looped fungal strand, or hypha.

Give back to that which gave to you, came the thought, not knowing what I might be feeding, or what it meant for the collection of cells and thoughts that comprised me.

A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you see. Roots to leaves, yes—those you can, in part, see. But it is more—it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one.

Notes of the same key respond to one another; Odors of the same nature merge together. Water flows toward what is wet, Fire rises toward what is dry. Clouds follow dragons; Winds follow tigers.

We were jigsawed, meant to fit together, making a whole picture.

Yet we are also drawn to people who are not exemplary, who do not illustrate good sense and responsibility, who are temperamental as stallions, mercurial as falcons, sensual as cheetahs. Before them we relax our compulsion to judge, no longer feel that they have a responsibility to answer to and for what they do and say. We are enthralled by the human animal, the animality in humans, the traits humans acquire in symbiosis with noble animals.

You know, anyone who wears glasses, in one sense or another, is a cyborg.

We're both very very lazy, and having someone else do half the work is very convenient.

People aren't the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.

La oscuridad reinaba en torno a mí; todo estaba tranquilo, todo. Pero en las alturas zumbaba el eterno canto de la atmósfera, ese bordoneo lejano, sin modulaciones, que jamás se calla. Presté atención tanto tiempo a ese murmullo sin fin, a ese murmullo morboso, que comenzó a turbarme. Eran, sin duda, las sinfonías de los mundos girando en el espacio por encima de mí, las estrellas que entonaban un himno.

The way Kathy Lee needs Regis, that's the way I need Jesus.

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.

Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

I have often told you that I am that little fish who swims about under a shark and, I believe, lives indelicately on its offal. Anyway, that is the way I am. Life moves over me in a vast black shadow and I swallow whatever it drops with relish, having learned in a very hard school that one cannot be both a parasite and enjoy self-nourishment without moving in worlds too fantastic for even my disordered imagination to people with meaning.

Traveling with a man is traveling alone.

Higher purpose: Every cell in your body agrees to work for the welfare of the whole; its individual welfare comes second.

We are well on our way to a unified theory of biology that will merge body and environment, brain and mind, genome and microbiome.