Quotes About Organism

I almost think that hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism. Where hope is lacking the soul dries up and withers...

Bohr argued that life was not infused into an organism by some mysterious 'vital' force but, like everything else in the universe, must be grounded in atoms and molecules that behaved according to the laws of physics and chemistry.

In the life of our organism, we are continually dealing with a development of force followed by a state of equilibrium. Of course, the human being has no conscious knowledge of what is really going on within him, but what takes place is so infinitely wise that the cleverness of the human ego is nothing by comparison.

The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become more terroristic.

Countless are the women parasites who, to satisfy their craving for pleasure and luxury, impoverish father or husband. These lame limbs in the social organism, which themselves accomplish nothing, but for whom all other limbs work, are the most flagrant example of womanly immorality in the present.

Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.

Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers. It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.

Our human dependence on the living processes of the earth was largely forgotten with the growth of industrial civilization. Now we are being forced to remember that Gaia is greater than we are and that the human economy is embedded within the ecology of the biosphere. So, in what sense is Gaia alive? And what difference does it make if we think of her as a living organism, as opposed to an inanimate physical system?

Never forget that the universe is a single living organism possessed of one substance and one soul, holding all things suspended in a single consciousness and creating all things with a single purpose that they might work together spinning and weaving and knotting whatever comes to pass.

Human society is a single organism, like an individual human body or a tree. But

Language is not morally neutral because the human brain is not neutral in its desires. Neither is the dog brain. Neither is the bird brain: crows hate owls. We like some things and dislike others, we approve of some things and disapprove of others. Such is the nature of being an organism.

The general rule in nature is that live things are soft within and rigid without.

The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology -- the study of life. We must learn to think both logically and bio-logically.

A property of an organism enters into its life (and survival) in many different ways, some more salient than others. But there is no simple notion of its being "for" some function.

One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution.

Everything (and everyone) alive today is descended from an organism that somehow survived the impact. But it does not follow from this that they (or we) are any better adapted. In times of extreme stress, the whole concept of fitness, at least in a Darwinian sense, loses its meaning: how could a creature be adapted, either well or ill, for conditions it has never before encountered in its entire evolutionary history?

The only good classification is a living classification.

I know not why, but all the noblest arts hold in perfection but for a very little moment. They soon reach a height from which they begin to decline, and when they have begun to decline it is a pity that they cannot be knocked on the head; for an art is like a living organism—better dead than dying.

It is futile for an artist to try to create an environment because you have an environment around you all the time. Any living organism has an environment.

The Harvard Law of Animal Behavior holds that under controlled experimental conditions of temperature, time, lighting, feeding, and training, the organism will behave as it damn well pleases.

When we look down at the Earth from space we see this amazing, indescribably beautiful planet; it looks like a living, breathing organism. But it also, at the same time, looks extremely fragile

Every new increase in the vast imperial organism seemed to me an unsound growth, like a cancer or dropsical edema which would eventually cause our death.

It is the elegance of nature that creates even the appearance of simplicity... It is not respectable to say that an organism is designed to be both stable as an entity and mutable in response to environment, though it must be said that this complex equilibrium is amazing and beautiful and everywhere repeated in a wealth of variations that can seem like virtuosity regaling itself with its own brilliance.

We have our body in mind because it helps govern behavior in all manner of situations that could threaten the integrity of the organism and compromise life.