Symbiosis Quotes

Bessie shifted with the passage of time, with the dial of a clock. I lay here wishing you were here, but you're not. The symbiosis of this relationship is incomplete. He stirred in his sleep, put his arm around her waist and breathed deeply in his sleep. She imagined that he was finally in all these weeks speaking to her, that recognition was there now - he was dead to her but not to another woman. ~ Abigail George

The integrative powers of life are manifested in the phenomena of symbiosis between organelles, in the varied forms of partnership within the same species or between different species; in the phenomena of regeneration, in lower species, of complete individuals from their fragments; in the re-formation of scrambled embryonic organs, etc. The self-assertive tendency is equally ubiquitous in the competitive struggle for life. ~ Arthur Koestler

Over the long term, symbiosis is more useful than parasitism. More fun, too. Ask any mitochondria. ~ Larry Wall

Fruit is freely given by the plant. It entrusts us with its seed, while surrounding it with the gift of fruit, as prepayment for conscious seed dispersal; the tree trusts us to do the right thing and care for its seeds as best we are able, by at least letting each one have a fighting chance. All too often we ignore this symbiotic pact, and mindlessly dispose of seeds to fates that have no possible future. ~ Mango Wodzak

But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom-a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom-and all of us are involved in it. ~ Wendell Berry

The multiplicity of human identity is not just a spiritual principle, it's a biological fact - a basic ecological reality. ... only 10% of the cells in your body belong to you. The rest are the cells of bacteria and microorganisms that call your body home, and without these symbionts living on and within your physical self, you would be unable to digest and process the nutrients necessary to keep you alive. Your physical body is teeming with a microscopic diversity of life that rivals a rainforest. The insight of the Gaia Theory - that "the Earth system behaves as a single self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components" - is as much a statement about our own physical bodies as it is about the planet. If we imagine the Earth as the body of a goddess, we can also imagine our own bodies as a sacred home to an ecologically complex and diverse array of microscopic life." -- Alison Leigh Lilly, "Naming the Water: Human and Deity Identity from an Earth-Centered Perspective ~ John Halstead

What can the love in my soul be compared to another wonderful soul which is so far and yet so close of my self? What can this symbiosis between two souls can be? What can love be when you feel you cannot sleep at night, that every drop of dew becomes a crystal in your heart, when every breeze of wind has magical meanings? What can love be when you feel that you want nothing more in this world that to be with the soul you love? But what can love be in other transcendental realities? What about our souls? Are our souls a waterfall, a true Niagara or a smile, a flirt of an angel? Are our souls a mere mood of a fairy or a lightening in a summer rain? Our souls could be all of this and much more. But what really happens in that transcendental reality when we feel we are truly in love, that we love so much that it hurts? That the air in the room is unbreathable, that the sentimental, spiritual or physical distances kill us? What happens when dawn find us sadder than ever, looking for an excuse or an argument for the person we love so much, our Great Love? What are all thses? What are the looks lost in the desert horizons of unfulfilment or those in the eyes that deeply loose each other in the others inside the souls? ~ Sorin Cerin

He truth is, we made each other, like we learned about in science class. Symbiosis. ~ Abigail Haas

Control thought of the theories as "slow death by," given the context: Slow death by aliens. Slow death by parallel universe. Slow death by malign unknown time-traveling force. Slow death by invasion from an alternate earth. Slow death by wildly divergent technology or the shadow biosphere or symbiosis or iconography or etymology. Death by this and by that. Death by indifference and inference. His favorite: "Surface-dwelling terrestrial organism, previously unknown." Hiding where all of these years? In a lake? ~ Jeff VanderMeer

Past, present, and future, the symbiosis of our lives," the old man continued quietly, gently. "Our birth, our life, our death, all tied into a single package that we spend our time on this earth unwrapping. Sometimes we see clearly what it is we are looking at. Sometimes we do not. Sometimes things happen to distract or deceive us, and we must look more carefully at what it is we hold. ~ Terry Brooks

The role of cinema here is not that of a servant nor is it to betray the painting. Rather it is to provide it with a new form of existence. The film of a painting is an aesthetic symbiosis of screen and painting, as is the lichen of the algae and mushroom.
To be annoyed by this is as ridiculous as to condemn the opera on behalf of theater and music. ~ Andre Bazin

The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. ~ Donna J. Haraway

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. ~ Samuel Johnson

Because of my medical and ideological training, I am accustomed to saying that life is adaptation and symbiosis. ~ Tabare Vazquez

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. ~ Rollo May

And again there are no words.
Words exist that can, used by a poet, achieve a dim monochrome of the body's love, but beyond that they fail clumsily.
My love flowed out to her, hers back to me. Mine stroked and soothed. Hers caressed. The distance - and the difference - between us dwindled and vanished. We could meet, mingle, and blend. Neither one of us existed any more; for a time there was a single being that was both. There was escape from the solitary cell; a brief symbiosis, sharing all the word ... ~ John Wyndham

There is no more valuable skill than studentship. The farther we go down one area of human understanding, the more we see the corollaries that all activities share. Everything I do for the rest of my life, all the skills I acquire, will be made possible because of my time spent on the mats. It has revealed a symbiosis between all things that I never knew existed. ~ Chris Matakas

The uneasy symbiosis between a military authoritarian state and democratic political processes is often attributed to the artificial nature of the country and the lack of a neat fit between social identities at the base and the arbitrary frontiers drawn by the departing colonial masters. ~ Ayesha Jalal

As you get older and more successful, you don't get magnetically drawn to aristocracy, you get magnetically drawn to power, and it gets magnetically drawn to you. It's a symbiosis whether you like it or not. ~ Duncan Roy

What you want is for music to love you back. That's why you pay your dues. You want to feel like you belong and are part of this symbiosis, metamorphosis, whatever you want to call it. ~ Tom Waits

In a novel, the biggest symbiosis exists between plot and character. In a song, it would be the lyrics and the melody. ~ Jesse Michaels

The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff. ~ Will Self

The Church encourages those in power to be truly at the service of the common good of their peoples. She urges financial leaders to take account of ethics and solidarity. And why should they not turn to God to draw inspiration from his designs? In this way, a new political and economic mindset would arise that would help to transform the absolute dichotomy between the economic and social spheres into a healthy symbiosis. ~ Pope Francis

Whatever symbiosis existed between us was real, tangible, and now, without her presence I could feel the absence of it, as if she were an extension of my own person. She was, I realized, that awful, wretched part of me that should be locked away and boarded up forever - like Jane's madwoman in the attic. She was the unfiltered version, the rawness that no one should ever see. She was every wicked thought, every forbidden desire turned real and visceral. ~ Christine Mangan

She had never witnessed such a symbiosis between two people, and there were moments when the sight of them made her wonder whether, in the end, a person maybe wasn't alone after all, whether in some cases, the smallest human unit was two rather than one. ~ Jan-Philipp Sendker

Yet we are also drawn to people who are not exemplary, who do not illustrate good sense and responsibility, who are temperamental as stallions, mercurial as falcons, sensual as cheetahs. Before them we relax our compulsion to judge, no longer feel that they have a responsibility to answer to and for what they do and say. We are enthralled by the human animal, the animality in
humans, the traits humans acquire in symbiosis with noble animals. ~ Alphonso Lingis

A celebrity is a person known for his well-knownness. Celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by being well known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis, celebrities live off each other. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

It's interesting when you're doing signing sessions with other writers and you look at the queues at each table and you can see definite human types gathering there ... My queue is always full of, you know, wild-eyed sleazebags and people who stare at me very intensely, as if I have some particular message for them. As if I must know that they've been reading me, that this dyad or symbiosis of reader and writer has been so intense that I must somehow know about it. ~ Martin Amis

The real estate interests and banks are in a kind of symbiosis. They're the largest-growing part of the economy. This is the sector that backs the political campaigns of senators, presidents and congressmen, and they use this leverage to make sure that their people dominate the Federal Reserve, Treasury and the federal housing agencies. ~ Michael Hudson

The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. ~ Terence McKenna

I see my own style as being a symbiosis of the styles of Alekhine, Tal and Fischer. ~ Garry Kasparov

With the frenzied pace in our own country, with the degenerating school system, with a crime rate that rises 30% a year, and with politicians that seem more interested in posturing than in governing, it has become more difficult, or should I say challenging, to achieve that inner symbiosis with life. ~ Frederick Lenz

When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity" - to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to - he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health. ~ Michael Pollan

There's some kind of dark symbiosis between lunatics and the Postal Service. ~ Don Novello

You know, a government should be a good thing. The Anglo-Saxons and the Germans rejoice in the phenomenon of government. They think that the recipe for human happiness is that you should make your desires and actions concordant with those of the government. So a German and an American will try to make the government work for him, protect him, and he will be more than happy to murder to preserve that wonderful symbiosis. And if he has some money to invest, he will invest it in the government, buying government bonds. He does this regardless of whether his government happens to be trillions of dollars in debt - that is, practically bankrupt. Despite his rhetoric of private enterprise, a Westerner will invest in his government. And we, Eastern and Central Europeans, and particularly Slavs, we all consider our governments to be absolutely the worst in the world. We are ashamed of our governments, and, as a rule, our government is ashamed of us, trying to improve us statistically, to say that we work more and drink less than we do. We think that there's no greater obstacle to human happiness than the government. So even if we have an institution pregnant with democratic potential, such as workers' self-management, we never even bother to attend a meeting unless absolutely forced. And as for voting, we circle any name without looking at whose it is, out of spite. To a Slav, there is nothing more disgusting than voting. We have an aversion to investing trust in any human being. So h ~ Josip Novakovich

A multidisciplinary study group ... estimated that it would be 1980 before developments in artificial intelligence make it possible for machines alone to do much thinking or problem solving of military significance. That would leave, say, five years to develop man-computer symbiosis and 15 years to use it. The 15 may be 10 or 500, but those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind. ~ J. C. R. Licklider

we have forgotten how to press our fingers
to the tilting planet's jugular and measure
her pulse. we have forgotten symbiosis,
that she is our mother.

we have forgotten that when we rape
our world we rape ourselves. ~ Beth Morey

I don't think there's a less elitist thing on earth to do than to try and reach out and connect with another human being . . . And that's what the best writing does, that's what art does. It looks a reader in the eye, and it proceeds honestly with that reader, and nakedly. There is a compact there, a bond, a relationship, a union, a symbiosis . . . It's not about you. Whether you're a genius or an idiot savant. It's about the work. The work is more important than you. So it's not about back-claps and plaudits and "isn't that author smart." It's about, "this book really connected with me. And even though you, my friend, are very different from me, I'm lending it to you, because I think it will connect with you as well." Community. Across the eras. Between people who have never met, who will never meet, who are nonetheless bound in something together, in different ways. ~ Colin Fleming

Can you feel the connection? We breathe so that the trees thrive and the trees breathe so that we are able to live. Perfect symbiosis… ~ Sanchita Pandey

The family tree of each of us is graced by all those great inventors: the beings who first tried out self-replication, the manufacture of protein machine tools, the cell, cooperation, predation, symbiosis, photosynthesis, breathing oxygen, sex, hormones, brains, and all the rest-inventions we use, some of them, minute-by-minute without ever wondering who devised them and how much we owe to these unknown benefactors, in a chain 100 billion links long. ~ Carl Sagan

Just as children, step by step, must separate from their parents, we will have to separate from them. And we will probably suffer ... from some degree of separation anxiety: because separation ends sweet symbiosis. Because separation reduces our power and control. Because separation makes us feel less needed, less important. And because separation exposes our children to danger. ~ Judith Viorst

Obama's Democrats have become the part of no. Real cuts to federal budget? No. Entitlement reform? No. Tax reform? No. Breaking the corrupt and fiscally unsustainable symbiosis between public-sector unions and state governments? Hell no. ~ Charles Krauthammer

We might believe that our world embraced everything, we might do our thing down here on the beach, drive around in our cars, phone each other and chat, visit one another, eat and drive and sit indoors imbibing the faces and opinions and fates of those appearing on the TV screen in this strange, semi-artificial symbiosis we inhabited and lull ourselves for longer and longer, year upon year, into thinking that it was all there was, but if on the odd occasion we were to raise our gaze to this, the only possible thought was one of incomprehension and impotence, for in fact how small and trivial was the world we allowed ourselves to be lured by? Yes, of course, the dramas we saw were magnificent, the images we internalized sublime and sometimes also apocalyptic, but be honest, slaves, what part did we play in them? None. ~ Knausgaard, Karl Ove

Missiologists have in recent years begun to think seriously about inculturation, and historians have begun to learn from them. When the Christian message is inserted into a cultural framework, if the messengers are insensitive to the local culture the result can be cultural imperialism. On the other hand, if they grant too much hegemony to the local culture, the result at best is 'syncretism' and at worst 'Christo-paganism.' Things are most wholesome when sensitive interchange takes place leading to 'a truly critical symbiosis.' But for this to happen, there must be a second stage - a time of 'pastoral follow-up work,' of catechizing and life formation enabling the new faith to express its genius in the institutions and reflexes of its new host culture. ~ Alan Kreider

Putting it into words will destroy any meaning. ~ Haruki Murakami

In the traditional modernist planning that created the suburbs, you put residential buildings in suburban neighborhoods, office spaces into brain parks and retail in shopping malls. But you fail to exploit the possibility of symbiosis or synthesis that way. ~ Bjarke Ingels

Saint George's legend tells of the dangers of mythical creatures and the value of man asserting dominance over them. Manu's tale, quite conversely, stresses the value of mercy, coexistence, and peaceful symbiosis. [...] Marlowe is a good man, but he only knows how to slay dragons. The world is full of dragon-slayers. What we need are a few more people who aren't too proud to listen to a fish. ~ William Ritter

In man-machine symbiosis, it is man who must adjust: The machines can't. ~ Alan Perlis

We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis. Our genomes are catalogues of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature, filed for all kinds of contingencies. ~ Lewis Thomas

Perhaps most important for nomads was the belief in the symbiosis that existed between wolf and humans on the steppe. Wolves were an integral part of keeping the balance of nature, ensuring that plagues of rabbits and rodents didn't break out, which in turn protected the all-important pasture for the nomads' herds. ~ Tim Cope

Anyone who suggests that there is a perfect symbiosis between the farmers' interest and the animals' is probably trying to sell you something (and it's not made of tofu) ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

I speculate that we shall come to accept the more radical idea that each one of our genes is a symbiotic unit. We are gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes. ~ Richard Dawkins

The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle ... yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word. ~ William S. Burroughs

Trees live in symbiosis with hyphae (fungus/mold roots). A tea spoon of dirt contains kilometers of these roots. One species can spread throughout entire forests over centuries. They exchange nutrients with trees, along with information about insects, drought and other dangers. It's like a 'wood wide web'. ~ Peter Wohlleben

If we are looking for models of self-sustaining communities, we need look no further than an old-growth forest. Or the old-growth cultures they raised in symbiosis with them. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

He sits aloof from the rest of the family, an inaccessible island with a rocky shoreline. You cannot make landfall on your own. You must first take my mother on board as the pilot to guide you through the treacherous channel. And her MO depends on the nature of the mission.

Sometimes when we had infuriated him, she was like one of those little grooming fish swimming right up to the great white shark in an apparently suicidal approach an nibbling at the menacing snout. And we would hold our breath, waiting for her to be gobbled up in a flash of fish fangs, but the great white wld exhibit some instinctive override, some primal understanding of emotional symbiosis, and would tolerate her proximity. And so the pattern had been established over decades. ~ Peter Godwin

The politics of banking is bad everywhere, including UK. Eurozone has more problems, unhealthy symbiosis. ~ Anat R. Admati

In short, conquest is in no sense a necessary sign of higher human development, though conquistadors have always thought otherwise. Any valid concept of organic development must use the primary terms of ecology-cooperation and symbiosis-as well as struggle and conflict, for even predators are part of a food chain, and do not 'conquer' their prey except to eat them. The idea of total conquest is an extrapolation from the existing power system: it indicates, not a desirable end, accomodation, but a pathological aberration, re-enforced by such rewards as this system bestows. As for the climactic notion that "the universe will be man's at last"-what is this but a paranoid fantasy, comparable to the claims of an asylum inmate who imagines that he is Emperor of the World? Such a claim is countless light-years away from reality. ~ Lewis Mumford

The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host. ~ William S. Burroughs

The field is a halfway house, halfway between the detail of those intimately known places and the ignorance of a landscape view ... The essence of a field is that the cultural accommodates the natural there. The human being makes room for and makes use of those organisms that are not him. In that way the field is a poem to symbiosis, and a human contract with the natural. ~ Adam Nicolson

My companions moved through [Rome] differently, aware of its significance but not subdued by it. They were not hushed by the Trevi Fountain; they were not silenced by the Colosseum. Instead, as we moved from one relic to the next, they debated philosophy - Hobbes and Descartes, Aquinas and Machiavelli. There was a kind of symbiosis in their relationship to these grand places: they gave life to the ancient architecture by making it the backdrop of their discourse, by refusing to worship at its altar as if it were a dead thing. ~ Tara Westover

Why are they together, the tree and the fungus? We don't know. The fungus could certainly live very well alone almost anywhere, but it chooses to entwine itself with the tree over an easier and more independent life. It has adapted to seek the rush of pure sweetness that comes directly from a plant root, such a strange and concentrated compound, unlike anything to be found elsewhere in the forest. And perhaps the fungus can somehow sense that when it is part of a symbiosis, it is also not alone. ~ Hope Jahren