Quotes About Symbiosis

Respiration—the source of energy that lets us farm and dance and speak. The breath of plants gives life to animals and the breath of animals gives life to plants. My breath is your breath, your breath is mine. It's the great poem of give and take, of reciprocity that animates the world. Isn't that a story worth telling? Only when people understand the symbiotic relationships that sustain them can they become people of corn, capable of gratitude and reciprocity

The plants adapt, the people adopt.

I've always known we were two puzzle pieces that fit together in a hollow that is our pain. There was a time when I was certain we were too damaged not to destroy each other. Now I think we are saving each other.

When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave us birth, will respond.

Our health relies entirely on the vitality of our fellow species on Earth.

Ils avaient poussé l'un à côté de l'autre comme deux arbres qui mêlent leurs racines sous le sol, leurs branches dans l'air, leur parfum dans le ciel ; seulement leur désir de se voir était le même

It was, I imagine, how bees feel. Not like an individual at all, but like one humming note in a whole world of perfect, useful music.

Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.

Mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle.

We are the living planet!

Without mankind machines are nothing.

From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.

Mountains complement desert as desert compliments city, as wilderness compliments and completes civilization.

We think of viruses as evil but in reality few are. Life usually seeks to cooperate, not fight.

If you were a mermaid, you said, If you were a mermaid, I was the sea.

At first we raced through space, like shadows and light; her rants, my raves; her dark hair, my blonde; black dresses, white. She's a purple-black African-violet-dark butterfly and I a white moth. We were two wild ponies, Dawn and Midnight, the wind electrifying our manes and our hooves quaking the city; we were photo negatives of each other, together making the perfect image of a girl.

It meant that if we let ourselves, we could get closer than we had ever been. Disappear into each other. You'd bleed and I wouldn't. Then we both would.

Life—all life—is in the service of life.

Where there is 'freedom from' without corresponding interrelationship, there is the anxiety of the defiant and isolated individual. Where there is dependence without freedom, there is the anxiety of the clinging person who cannot live outside a symbiosis.

Light and darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being in joyful rhythm.

I feel as though I'm not breathing when I'm out of his presence. He's the oxygen in my air, the sun in my universe, the staff of my life. —Jane Gardiner

Opposites are not contradictory but complementary.

Teachers and learners are correlates, one of which was never intended to be without the other.

No, this was a melting together, a vanishing together into a soft, dark womb of warmth.