Sterile Quotes

“Some have given up the expectation of meeting genuine, ‘heartfelt’ people and prefer to retire to a mute world, where fish, at least, give a feeling of recognition. In the wake of the unbearable sterile daily noise, their life has turned into a fluid universe of silence, dream, and stillness and their compass has come to be a space beyond fear, deception, and betrayal. Fish never disappoint. (Fish for silence)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built. Life is commonplace; the papers are sterile; audacity and romance seem to have passed forever from the criminal world. Can you ask me, then, whether I am ready to look into any new problem, however trivial it may prove?”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes: Volume II

“Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it's a product of an assembly line.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“Alex snorted as he packed the wound with sticky rice.

"Is that stuff sterile?" Ted asked, staring at Alex.

"They boil it, don't they?" Alex said, not looking up from what he was doing.

Ted's frown deepened. "That doesn't seem like enough."

"Trust me." Alex looked up now and smiled a little. His voice altered just a little bit, not enough to be a full command voice, but enough to be way more persuasive than any normal person's voice. "It's an old wives' tale, but it works every time.”
― Eileen Rendahl, Don't Kill The Messenger

“Living in sterile man-made environments that are disconnected from nature should be expected to lead to sickness.”
― Steven Magee

“Time... is an essential requirement for effective research. An investigator may be given a palace to live in, a perfect laboratory to work in, he may be surrounded by all the conveniences money can provide; but if his time is taken from him he will remain sterile.”
― Walter Bradford Cannon

“Between cold war and hot peace, our love got sterilized to death.”
― Natalya Vorobyova

“The desire for possession is only another form of the desire to endure; it is this that comprises the impotent delirium of love. No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession. On the pitiless earth where lovers are often separated in death and are always born divided, the total possession of another human being and absolute communion throughout an entire lifetime are impossible dreams. The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves. The shamefaced suffering of the abandoned lover is not so much due to being no longer loved as to knowing that the other partner can and must love again. In the final analysis, every man devoured by the overpowering desire to endure and possess wishes that those whom he has loved were either sterile or dead. This is real rebellion. Those who have not insisted, at least once, on the absolute virginity of human beings and of the world, who have not trembled with longing and impotence at the fact that it is impossible, and have then not been destroyed by trying to love halfheartedly, perpetually forced back upon their longing for the absolute, cannot understand the realities of rebellion and its ravening desire for destruction. But the lives of others always escape us, and we escape them too; they have no firm outline. Life from this point of view is without style. It is only an impulse that endlessly pursues its form without ever finding it. Man, tortured by this, tries in vain to find the form that will impose certain limits between which he can be king.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“How sterile my soul and my mind are, and yet constantly tormented by empty voluptuous and excruciating labor pains!”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Essential Kierkegaard

“2020 was the year of obsessive hand washing.”
― Steven Magee

“I am not a fan of sealed up sterile homes or Faraday cages and their use in human health, although I do understand that some people do feel relief in these environments.”
― Steven Magee

“Now pain, like the other evils, may of course recur because the cause of the first pain (disease, or an enemy) is still operative: but pain has no tendency, in its own right, to proliferate. When it is over, it is over, and the natural sequel is joy. This distinction may be put the other way round. After an error you need not only to remove the causes (the fatigue or bad writing) but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an 'undoing' is required. Pain requires no such undoing. You may need to heal the disease which caused it, but the pain, once over, is sterile—whereas every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Excessive cleanliness is proven to be hazardous to long term human health.”
― Steven Magee, Hypoxia, Mental Illness & Chronic Fatigue