Organism Quotes

“Every living organism is fulfilled when it follows the right path for its own nature.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“THE ORGANIC FOODS MYTH

A few decades ago, a woman tried to sue a butter company that had printed the word 'LITE' on its product's packaging. She claimed to have gained so much weight from eating the butter, even though it was labeled as being 'LITE'. In court, the lawyer representing the butter company simply held up the container of butter and said to the judge, "My client did not lie. The container is indeed 'light in weight'. The woman lost the case.

In a marketing class in college, we were assigned this case study to show us that 'puffery' is legal. This means that you can deceptively use words with double meanings to sell a product, even though they could mislead customers into thinking your words mean something different. I am using this example to touch upon the myth of organic foods. If I was a lawyer representing a company that had labeled its oranges as being organic, and a man was suing my client because he found out that the oranges were being sprayed with toxins, my defense opening statement would be very simple: "If it's not plastic or metallic, it's organic."

Most products labeled as being organic are not really organic. This is the truth. You pay premium prices for products you think are grown without chemicals, but most products are. If an apple is labeled as being organic, it could mean two things. Either the apple tree itself is free from chemicals, or just the soil. One or the other, but rarely both. The truth is, the word 'organic' can mean many things, and taking a farmer to court would be difficult if you found out his fruits were indeed sprayed with pesticides. After all, all organisms on earth are scientifically labeled as being organic, unless they are made of plastic or metal. The word 'organic' comes from the word 'organism', meaning something that is, or once was, living and breathing air, water and sunlight.

So, the next time you stroll through your local supermarket and see brown pears that are labeled as being organic, know that they could have been third-rate fare sourced from the last day of a weekend market, and have been re-labeled to be sold to a gullible crowd for a premium price. I have a friend who thinks that organic foods have to look beat up and deformed because the use of chemicals is what makes them look perfect and flawless. This is not true. Chemical-free foods can look perfect if grown in your backyard. If you go to jungles or forests untouched by man, you will see fruit and vegetables that look like they sprouted from trees from Heaven. So be cautious the next time you buy anything labeled as 'organic'. Unless you personally know the farmer or the company selling the products, don't trust what you read. You, me, and everything on land and sea are organic.


Suzy Kassem,
Truth Is Crying”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“There is a deep interconnectedness of all life on earth, from the tiniest organisms, to the largest ecosystems, and absolutely between each person.”
― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

“...it would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms. Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being. It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own. The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species. The experiences - and therefore the realities - of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another. In the world of a fly, says Uexkull, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things.”
― Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture

“A dying organism is often observed to be capable of extraordinary endurance and strength. ... When any living organism is attacked, its whole function seems to aim toward reproduction.”
― John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

“Briefly summarising, we can express the proposed law thus: consciousness is bound up with learning in organic substance; organic competence is unconscious. Still more briefly, and put in a form which is admittedly rather obscure and open to misunderstanding: Becoming is conscious, being unconscious.”
― Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World

“An organism is not a collection of cells; it’s a function that tells cells how to behave. And this function is not implemented as some kind of supernatural thing, like some morphogenetic field, it is an emergent result of the interactions of each cell with each other cell.”
― Joscha Bach

“Sometimes, when I'm alone, I wonder if it really counts as being alone, since I am covered in millions of other living organisms.”
― Travis Jeremiah Dahnke, Write like no one is reading

“The cell, this elementary keystone of living nature, is far from being a peculiar chemical giant molecule or even a living protein and as such is not likely to fall prey to the field of an advanced chemistry. The cell is itself an organism, constituted of many small units of life.”
― Oscar Hertwig

“In living things, nature springs an ontological surprise in which the world-accident of terrestrial conditions brings to light an entirely new possibility of being: systems of matter that are unities of a manifold, not in virtue of a synthesizing perception whose object they happen to be, nor by the mere concurrence of the forces that bind their parts together, but in virtue of themselves, for the sake of themselves, and continually sustained by themselves. Here wholeness is self-integrating in active performance, and form for once is the cause rather than the result of the material collections in which it successively subsists. Unity here is self-unifying, by means of changing multiplicity. Sameness, while it last, (and it does not last inertially, in the manner of static identity or of on-moving continuity), is perpetual self-renewal through process, borne on the shift of otherness. This active self-integration of life alone gives substance to the term “individual”: it alone yields the ontological concept of an individual as against a merely phenomenological one. The ontological individual, its very existence at any moment, its duration and its identity in duration is, then, essentially its own function, its own concern, its own continuous achievement. In this process of self-sustained being, the relation of the organism to its own concern, its own continuous achievement.
In this process of self-sustained being, the relation of the organism to its material substance is of a double nature: the materials are essential to its specifically, accidental individually; it coincides with their actual collection at the instant, but is not bound to any one collection in the succession of instants, “riding” their change like the crest of a wave and bound only to their form of collection which endures as its own feat. Dependent on their availability as materials, its is independent of their sameness as these; its own, functional identity, passingly incorporating theirs, is of a different order. In a word, the organic form stands in a dialectical relation of needful freedom to matter.”
― Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology

“When you don’t allow nature to take its course and keep interfering with its freedom and exploiting it, the repercussions are bound to happen. Freedom is the common goal which every organism strives to accomplish.”
― Shivanshu K. Srivastava

“He ceased to be a person so that he could remain a successful organism.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

“Non-living things are not living, yet they live longer than the living.”
― John Joclebs Bassey, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“Something acquires meaning for an organism to the extent that it relates (either positively or negatively) to the norm of the maintenance of the organism's integrity.”
― Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

“Only by intertwining these two perspectives, the biological and the phenomenological, can we gain a fuller understanding of the immanent purposiveness of the organism and the deep continuity of life and mind.”
― Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

“The organism's environment is the sense it makes of the world. This environment is a place of significance and valence, as a result of the global action of the organism.”
― Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

“A tissue is evidently an enduring thing. It's functional and structural conditions become modified from moment to moment. Time is really the fourth dimension of living organisms. It enters as part into the constitution of a tissue. Cell colonies, or organs, are events which progressively unfold themselves. They must be studied like history.”
― Alexis Carrel

“My only hope lay in my ability to make a metamorphic recovery, to accept in every way the nightmarish order of things so that I could continue to exist as a successful organism even without the protective nonsense of the mind and the imagination, the protective dream of having any kind of soul or self.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

“Once, in the morning, I decided I would be a biologist, and spent hours in the library studying, preparing for my amazing career. I told the librarian, who still smiles at me. She must think I will get out of this place and make it one day. One book I found about organisms was so fascinating I sat down with it in the stacks, engrossed. It took me fifteen minutes to realise it was about orgasms. I read until lunch and then hid the book on the shelf.”
― Anna Whateley, Peta Lyre’s Rating Normal

“Added to all this is the universal dread of reality. We "pale-faces" have it, all of
us, although we are seldom, and most of us never, conscious of it. It is the
spiritual weakness of the "Late" man of the higher civilizations, who lives in his
cities cut off from the peasant and the soil and thereby from the natural
experiencing of destiny, time, and death. He has become too wide awake, too
accustomed to ponder perpetually over yesterday and tomorrow, and cannot bear
that which he sees and is forced to see: the relentless course of things, senseless
chance, and real history striding pitilessly through the centuries into which the
individual with his tiny scrap of private life is irrevocably born at the appointed
place. That is what he longs to forget, refute, or contest. He takes flight from
history into solitude, into imaginary far-away systems, into some faith or another,
or into suicide. Like a grotesque ostrich he buries his head in hopes, ideals, and
cowardly optimism: it is so, but it ought not to be, therefore it is otherwise. We
sing in the woods at night because we are afraid.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision: Germany and World-Historical Evolution

“The Church is both organism and organization - Woven together in a beautifully messy dance that stumbles across the stage of a fallen world.”
― Todd Stocker

“Man's nature acts as one whole, with everything that is in it, conscious or unconscious.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“The organism - there was no other thing she could think to call it - churned and moved as it propelled itself across the ground, the living bodies of animals briefly appearing before being submerged in a sea of bugs as others rose to the surface.

And then there were the bones.

At first she didn't quite understand what she was seeing. For a moment she believed that they were pieces of wood - limbs of trees picked up by the undulating mass - but when she saw the skull, its jaw hanging open in a silent scream, she understood the horror of what it was.

the remains of victims were a part of its body, flowing within the multitude that made up its mass.”
― Thomas E. Sniegoski, Savage

“Mercy is not the justice to a living organism ... it is the justice to every living organism... Hesham Nebr
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الرحمة ليست عدل لكائن حي ...بل هي عدل لكل كائن حي ...هشام نيبر”
― Hesham Nebr

“Everyone in this world is connected in a spiritual space. We can’t hurt others without hurting ourselves. The more you hurt others, the more wounds are created in you because the whole world is like one organism of which you too are an integral part.”
― Awdhesh Singh, 31 Ways to Happiness

“William Hamilton once referred to the 'gavotte of chromosomes' seen in the process of cell division and in sex. This is a good image - a courtly dance, tuned by evolution, of joining and separating. We can seen some of the same thing on a larger scale, in - to adopt Julian Huxley's phrase - 'the movement of individuality.' The process at this larger scale is not itself an adaptation, a to-and-fro tuned by evolutionary design. Instead it is the recurring upshot of masses of separate evolutionary events. But there is some of the same rhythm of sealing off and opening up, of consolidating and reaching out, in the dynamic linking organisms and Darwinian individuals.”
― Peter Godfrey-Smith, From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality

“And my mind - another disease, the disease of a disease. Everywhere my mind sees the disease of other minds and other bodies, these other organisms that are only other diseases, an absolute nightmare of the organism.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

“English: "To say that a car is not living is similar to saying that an enzyme is not living."

Česky: „Říct, že auto není živé, je podobné, jako říct, že enzym není živý.”
― Sebastián Wortys, Vtiposcifilo-z/s-ofie

“This movement involves, first of all, that you relinquish all control over your experience. The language used in describing this process is one of surrendering your self to the wisdom of the experiential organism, which, one learns, is often wiser than the conscious self. Thus it involves first of all a trust in your organism. Or to use some interpersonal terms to describe this intrapersonal event, it involves more than being non-directive, or even empathic toward your experience. Basically it means that you become experience-centered. The self, as the thinker about, or tinkerer with experience, must in effect die, or at least drastically diminish in importance for the growth forces of the experiential organism to bear their fruit.”
― Harry Albert Van Belle, Basic Intent and Therapeutic Approach of Carl R. Rogers: A Study of His View of Man in Relation to His View of Therapy, Personality, and Interpersona

“The fact that the body ages and dies is not
a mistake. It is part of the genes’ strategy to copy themselves from
one generation of organisms to the next.”
― Jarle Breivik, Making Sense of Cancer: From Its Evolutionary Origin to Its Societal Impact and the Ultimate Solution