Rene Dubos Quotes

With reference to life there is not one nature; there are only associations of states and circumstances, varying from place to place and from time to time.

Search for the cause may be a hopeless pursuit because most disease states are the indirect outcome of a constellation of circumstances.

There is an unbroken continuum from the wisdom of the body to the wisdom of the mind, from the wisdom of the individual to the wisdom of the race.

Any attempt to shape the world and modify human personality in order to create a self-chosen pattern of life involves many unknown consequences. Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back. The multiplicity of determinants which affect biological systems limits the power of the experimental method to predict their trends and behavior.

Eradication of microbial disease is a will-o'-the-wisp; pursuing it leads into a morass of hazy biological concepts and half truths.

Sometimes the more measurable drives out the most important.

It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.

Gauss replied, when asked how soon he expected to reach certain mathematical conclusions, that he had them long ago, all he was worrying about was how to reach them!

Man could escape danger only by renouncing adventure, by abandoning that which has given to the human condition its unique character and genius among the rest of living things.

The very process of living is a continual interplay between the individual and his environment, often taking the form of a struggle resulting in injury or disease.

You cannot see the Milky Way in New York City any more ... We risk the loss of our sensual perception. And if you lose those, naturally, you try to compensate by other stimulations, by very loud noises, or by bright lights or drugs.

Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.

It is a disturbing fact that Western civilization, which claims to have achieved the highest standard of health in history, finds itself compelled to spend ever-increasing sums for the control of disease.

Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious manifestations, yet some of their worst enemies creep on them unobtrusively.

One may wonder indeed whether the pretense of superior health is not itself rapidly becoming a mental aberration.

But solving problems of disease is not the same thing as creating health and happiness. ( ... ) Health and happiness are the expression of the manner in which the individual responds and adapts to the challenges that he meets in everyday life.

The word "wilderness" occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory.

Each human being is unique, unprecedented, unrepeatable.

The mechanisms of vis medicatrix naturae - the most healing power of nature - are so effective that most diseases are self-terminating.

As far as life is concerned, there is no such thing as "Nature". There are only homes. Home is that environment to which the individual has become adapted; and almost everything is unnatural outside his range of adaptation. Harmonious equilibrium with nature is an abstract concept with a Platonic beauty but lacking the flesh and blood of life. It fails, in particular, to convey the creative emergent quality of human existence.

Human life is now molded to a large extent by the changes that man has brought about in his external environment and by his attempts at controlling body and soul.

Man shapes himself through decisions that shape his environment.

Each type of civilization has had diseases peculiar to it and at each period the various social groups in any community also have differed in this regard.

Whatever his inhibitions and tastes, Western man believes in the natural holiness of seminudism and raw vegetable juice, because these have become for him symbols of unadultered nature.

A sense of continuity with the rest of creation is a form of religious experience essential to sanity.

Man not only survives and functions in his environment, he shapes it and he is shaped by it.

What happens in the mind of man is always reflected in the disease of his body.

More can be learned from what works than from what fails.

But too often the goal of the planners is a universal gray state of health corresponding to absence of disease rather than to a positive attribute conducive to joyful and creative living. This kind of health will not rule out and may even generate another form of ill, the boredom which is the penalty of a formula of life where nothing is left unforeseen.

A very large percentage of illnesses are the expressions of inadequate responses to the environment.

Men as a rule are more preoccupied with the dangers that threaten their life than interested in the biological forces on which they depend for a constructive existence.