Inorganic Quotes & Sayings
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Top Inorganic Quotes

The power to assimilate crude inorganic matter as it is found in the soil, and convert it into living protoplasm and other organic substances, or to use such substances in performing physiological function, does not belong to the animal organism. It is the office of plant life or vegetation to convert the primary elements from their crude inorganic state into the organic state. This conversion cannot be accomplished by any synthetic process known to the laboratory.
After the plant has raised the crude inorganic matter of the soil into plant protoplasm, the animal may take these and raise them to a still higher plane - that of animal protoplasm. But the animal cannot do the work of the plant. He must get his food either directly or indirectly from the plant kingdom. That is, the animal must either eat the plant or its fruits, or he must eat the animal that has eaten the plant. Food must be in the organic form. Air and water form the only exceptions to this rule. — Herbert M. Shelton

It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from a more complex life form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another-the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter — William S. Burroughs

I can safely say that other than macaroni and cheese, there's no processed food in my life. There's no inorganic food in my life these days. There's no junk food. There's not a lot of sugar. There's no soy. I mean, really everything that's going into my body is pretty pure. — Ginnifer Goodwin

We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components. — Terence McKenna

This investigation has yielded an unanticipated result that reaction of cyanic acid with ammonia gives urea, a noteworthy result in as much as it provides an example of the artificial production of an organic, indeed a so-called animal, substance from inorganic substances. — Friedrich Wohler

Even matter called inorganic, believed to be dead, responds to irritants and gives unmistakable evidence of a living principle within. Everything that exists, organic or inorganic, animated or inert, is susceptible to stimulus from the outside. — Nikola Tesla

What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform the human world into an inorganic reign in which everything goes well, everything functions as a subject of an impersonal will. The desire for order is at the same time a desire for death, because life is a perpetual violation of order. Or, inversely, the desire for order is a virtuous pretext by which man's hatred for man justifies its crimes. — Milan Kundera

Still - " Tigerishka temporized - "are things I will tell." Then, at court-stenographer speed, and a little singsong, as if it were very boring to her: "I come superior galactic culture. Read minds, throw thoughts, sail hyperspace, live forever if want, blow up suns - all that sort stuff. Look like animal - resume ancestral shapes. Make brains small but really huge - (psychophysiosubmicrominiaturization! We stay superior.) You not believe? So listen. Plants eat inorganic: they superior! Animals eat plants: they superior. Cats eat fresh meat: we most superior! Monkeys try eat everything: a mess!" Then without pause: "Wanderer sail hyperspace. Yes, star photos, I know. Need fuel - much matter for converters. Your moon good woodpile. Smash, pulverize, dredge. We fuel up, then go. No need you monkeys get hot and bothered. — Fritz Leiber

Maybe it is not the destructiveness of the volcano that pleases most, though everyone loves a conflagration, but its defiance of the law of gravity to which every inorganic mass is subject. What pleases first at the sight of the plant world is its vertical upward direction. That is why we love trees. Perhaps we attend to a volcano for its elevation, like ballet. How high the molten rocks soar, how far above the mushrooming cloud. The thrill is that the mountain blows itself up, even if it must then like the dancer return to earth; even if it does not simply descend - it falls, falls on us. But first it goes up, it flies. Whereas everything pulls, drags down. Down. — Susan Sontag

Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field. — Don DeLillo

We are compelled by reflection to recognize that God is not to be placed against the material world [as in Christianity], but must be placed as a 'divine power' or 'moving spirit' within the cosmos itself ... All the wonderful phenomena of nature around us, organic as well as inorganic, are only various products of one and the same original force. — Ernst Haeckel

Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a "stable pattern of inorganic values." The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified. — Robert M. Pirsig

I can't believe I spent 13 years at school and never got taught cooking, gardening, conversation, massage, Latin, or philosophy. What were they thinking? That I would somehow live off inorganic chemistry? — Neel Burton

With the exception of autotrophic bacteria, the green, or chlorophyll-bearing, plants are the only living forms on this planet capable of synthesizing organic matter out of inorganic elements and simple compounds. — Selman Waksman

Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people. — Paula Fox

All space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some degree of life in it, and matter/space is more alive or less alive according to its structure and arrangement. — Christopher Alexander

Humanity as such, we might say, is a large collective drifting into the future with survival as its shared interest. This law differs from the "laws" that we have written down, and that have such an inorganic connotation. This law exists hardly to reign in outpourings of human instinct, but rather, is aligned with the incohate impulses toward life esconced in our hearts; it is an unspoken agreement among human beings where there are more than one. In short, this naked law, fundamental to survival,was altered and institutionalized over many thousands of years of history before our laws came to be. — Koji Suzuki

It is essential for evolution to become the central core of any educational system, because it is evolution, in the broad sense, that links inorganic nature with life, and the stars with the earth, and matter with mind, and animals with man. Human history is a continuation of biological evolution in a different form. — Julian Huxley

The season developed and matured. Another year's instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and breathings. — Thomas Hardy

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments ... — Julia London

Geology is the science which investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature; it enquires into the causes of these changes, and the influence which they have exerted in modifying the surface and external structure of our planet. — Charles Lyell

The theory of evolution is totally inadequate to explain the origin and manifestation of the inorganic world. — John Ambrose Fleming

1. An honest ego in a healthy body
2. An eye to see nature
3. A heart to feel nature
4. Courage to follow nature
5. A sense of proportion (humor)
6. Appreciation of work as idea and idea as work
7. Fertility of imagination
8. Capacity for faith and rebellion
9. Disregard for commonplace (inorganic) elegance
10. Instinctive cooperation — Frank Lloyd Wright

The inorganic world out of which life has emerged and into which, in season, it falls back, possesses the latent capacity for endless ramification and diversity. A few chance elements which appear thoroughly stable in their reactions dress up as for a masked ball and go strolling, hunted and hunter together. Their forms alter through the ages. They are shape-shifters, role-changers. Like flying lizard or ancestral men, they run their course and vanish, never to return. The chemicals of which their bodies were composed lie all about us but by no known magic can we return a lost species to life. Life, in fact, is the product of singular and unreturning contingencies of which the inorganic world disclaims knowledge. Only its elements, swept up in the mysterious living vortex, evoke new forms, new habits, and new thoughts. — Loren Eiseley

Something different is disclosed in the drunkenness of passion: the landscape of the body ... These landscapes are traversed by paths which lead sexuality into the world of the inorganic. Fashion itself is only another medium enticing it still more deeply into the universe of matter. — Walter Benjamin

In contrast to the inorganic thereness of lifeless matter, living beings are not mere appearances. To be alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display which answers the fact of one's own appearingness. Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them. — Hannah

We declare that only man exists. This is not to say that material, inorganic nature and nonhuman beings-animals and plants-are in any sense unreal, insubstantial, or illusory because they do not so exist. We merely state that the reality of these nonhuman realms differs from that of human existence, whose primary characteristic is Da-sein (literally being-the-there) ... Man as man is present ... in a manner wholly different from ... inanimate things. — Medard Boss

"Humanism" is to be human, to think, to analyze, and to probe. To respond and to be stimulated by all living things - beasts, fowl, and fishes. To respond through touch, sight, smell, and sound to all things in nature - both organic and inorganic-to colors, shapes, and textures - to not only look at a blade of grass but to really see a blade of grass. These things, to me, are what life and living are all about. I would call it "Humanism." — Jacob Lawrence

If you can't afford organic food and are unable to grow your own, it's crucial to wash all inorganic produce very carefully to minimize the toxins you consume. Soak everything for 20 minutes in water with vinegar and salt or water with fresh lemon juice and salt. — Suzanne Somers

In the pursuit of my investigations I was unconsciously led into the border region of physics and physiology. To my amazement, I found boundary lines vanishing, and points of contact emerging, between the realms of the living and the non-living. Inorganic matter was perceived as anything but inert; it was athrill under the action of multitudinous forces. A universal reaction seemed to bring metal, plant and animal under a common law. They all exhibited essentially the same phenomena of fatigue and depression, with possibilities of recovery and of exaltation, as well as the permanent irresponsiveness associated with death. Filled with awe at this stupendous generalization, it was with great hope that I announced my results before the Royal Society - results demonstrated by experiments. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Receptor chemistry, the chemistry of artificial receptor molecules, may be considered a generalized coordination chemistry, not limited to transition metal ions but extending to all types of substrates: cationic, anionic or neutral species of organic, inorganic or biological nature. — Jean-Marie Lehn

We can either help to make this world a more incredible place than it has ever been, or we can hasten its return to inorganic dust. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Whatever life may really be, it is to us an abstraction: for the word is a generalised term to signify that which is common to all animals and plants, and which is not directly operative in the inorganic world. — Oliver Joseph Lodge

The whole analogy of natural operations furnishes so complete and crushing an argument against the intervention of any but what are termed secondary causes, in the production of all the phenomena of the universe; that, in view of the intimate relations between Man and the rest of the living world; and between the forces exerted by the latter and all other forces, I can see no excuse for doubting that all are co-ordinated terms of Nature's great progression, from the formless to the formed from the inorganic to the organic from blind force to conscious intellect and will. — Thomas Huxley

There is the theory that all the living forms in the world have arisen from a single source which itself came from an inorganic form. This theory can be called the 'general theory of evolution,' and the evidence which supports this is not sufficiently strong to allow us to consider it as anything more than a working hypothesis. — Gerald A. Kerkut

Evolution is the gradual development and stratification of progressive series of wholes, stretching from the inorganic beginnings to the highest level of spiritual creation. — Jan Smuts

For the first time I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes - as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.
[Upon hearing the Periodic Table explained in a first-tern university lecture.] — C.P. Snow

Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, Saga University in Japan, and the University of California, Davis, proposed creating an artificial inorganic leaf modeled on the real thing. They took a leaf of Anemone vitifolia, a plant native to China, and injected its veins with titanium dioxide-a well-known industrial photocatalyst. By taking on the precise branching shape and structure of the leaf's veins, the titanium dioxide produced much higher light-harvesting ability than if ti was used in a traditional configuration. The researchers found an astounding 800 percent increase in hydrogen production as well. The total performance was 300 percent more active than the world's best commercial photocatalysts. When they added platinum nanoparticles to the mix, it increased activity by a further 1,000 percent. — Jay Harman

Man is a little world--a microcosm inside the great universe. Like a fetus, he is suspended, by all his three spirits, in the matrix of the macrocosmos; and while his terrestrial body is in constant sympathy with its parent earth, his astral soul lives in unison with the sidereal anima mundi. He is in it, as it is in him, for the world-pervading element fills all space, and is space itself, only shoreless and infinite. As to his third spirit, the divine, what is it but an infinitesimal ray, one of the countless radiations proceeding directly from the Highest Cause--the Spiritual Light of the World? This is the trinity of organic and inorganic nature--the spiritual and the physical, which are three in one, and of which Proclus says that 'The first monad is the Eternal God; the second, eternity; the third, the paradigm, or pattern of the universe;' the three constituting the Intelligible Triad. — Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

Synthetic or inorganic substances do not contain any 'life force'; they are not dynamic. Everything is made of chemicals, but organic substances like essential oils have a structure which only mother nature can put together. They have a life force, an additional impulse which can only be found in living things. — Robert Tisserand

Spencer was searching for a woman interested in gold, inorganic chemistry, outdoor sex and the music of Bach. In short, he was looking for himself, only female. — Woody Allen

Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and intellectual values. — Robert M. Pirsig

The process of doing a play is an organic one, and the process of doing a film is totally inorganic. — Kevin Spacey

In most ecological systems you have a composite, biotic components as well as abiotic components acting together to form a whole, whereas in a human built environment most of the components are abiotic or they are inorganic. One of the first things we need to do is to complement the inorganic components with more organic components, and to make them interact to form a whole. — Ken Yeang

Even though he was a devout Catholic, he came to believe that the life force emerged from the action of the fundamental properties of natural forces in the inorganic world, combining into action to give rise to life. — R. Douglas Fields

This new force, which was unknown until now, is common to organic and inorganic nature. I do not believe that this is a force entirely independent of the electrochemical affinities of matter; I believe, on the contrary, that it is only a new manifestation, but since we cannot see their connection and mutual dependence, it will be easier to designate it by a separate name. I will call this force catalytic force. Similarly, I will call the decomposition of bodies by this force catalysis, as one designates the decomposition of bodies by chemical affinity analysis. — Jons Jacob Berzelius

Our everyday language has become encumbered, Germanic, artificial, bureaucratic, inorganic. It may not be exaggerated to say that by now American writers face but two alternatives: write English, or write gobbledygook. — John Lukacs

In inorganic chemistry the radicals are simple; in organic chemistry they are compounds - that is the sole difference. — Jean-Baptiste Dumas

But American statesmen have studied the constitutions of other states more than that of their own, and have succeeded in obscuring the American system in the minds of the people, and giving them in its place pure and simple democracy, which is its false development or corruption. Under the influence of this false development, the people were fast losing sight of the political truth that, though the people are sovereign, it is the organic, not the inorganic people, the territorial people, not the people as simple population, and were beginning to assert the absolute God-given right of the majority to govern. All the changes made in the bosom of the States themselves have consisted in removing all obstacles to the irresponsible will of the majority, leaving minorities and individuals at their mercy. This tendency to a centralized democracy had more to do with provoking secession and rebellion than the anti-slavery sentiments of the Northern, Central, and Western States. — Orestes Augustus Brownson

It intruded on an inorganic wasteland and set up shop. What evolved was a global workhouse where nothing is ever at rest, where the generation and discarding of life incessantly goes on. By what virtue, then, is it entitled to receive a pardon for this original sin - a capital crime in reverse, just as reproduction makes one an accessory before the fact to an individual's death? — Anonymous

It has occurred to me that possibly the white corpuscles may have the office of picking up and digesting bacterial organisms when by any means they find their way into the blood. The propensity exhibited by the leukocytes for picking up inorganic granules is well known, and that they may be able not only to pick up but to assimilate, and so dispose of, the bacteria which come in their way does not seem to me very improbable in view of the fact that amoebae, which resemble them so closely, feed upon bacteria and similar organisms. — George Miller Sternberg

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. — Charles Darwin

We only invented the word organic because we made things inorganic.
We only invented the word natural because we made things unnatural.
We only invented the word permaculture because we made agriculture. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

All of those things - rock and men and river - resisted change, resisted the coming as they did the going. Hood warmed and rose slowly, breaking open the plain, and cooled slowly over the plain it buried. The nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis, yet things and process are one, and the line from inorganic to organic and back is uninterrupted and unbroken. — William Least Heat-Moon

We stand poised on the brink of becoming true cyborgs, of having inorganic features that are inseparable from our bodies, features that modify our abilities, desires, personalities and identities. — Yuval Noah Harari

What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen. — D.H. Lawrence

The hypothesis that life has developed from inorganic matter is, at present, still an article of faith. — J. W. N. Sullivan

The properties which differentiate living matter from any kind of inorganic imitation may be instinctively felt, but can hardly be formulated without expert knowledge. — Oliver Joseph Lodge

There are many great bands of perception in the universe. There are both organic and inorganic bands of perception. — Frederick Lenz

Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by biological patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic scientist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language." Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived. — Robert M. Pirsig

Air is traditionally 'thin,' but the more we learn about our atmosphere, the more substantial it becomes. In some places it is so filled with inorganic flotsam that it is almost thick enough to plough; in others, it has become so primed with the by-products of life that it comes close to being a living tissue in its own right. — Lyall Watson

Modem science, then, maintains on the one hand that nature, both organic and inorganic, strives towards a state of order and that man's actions are governed by the same tendency. — Rudolf Arnheim

I'm taking inorganic chem and physics not because I want to but because I have to. Not every doctor wants to be a scientist. Some of us just want to take care of sick people. I can't help thinking that medicine is more closely aligned to the humanities than to the sciences. I can't help thinking that I could learn more about being a good doctor from William Shakespeare than I could from Isaac Newton. After all, isn't understanding people at least as important as understanding pathology? — Michael J. Collins

There is not much to enjoy in a layer of inorganic human bone dusted behind one's ear or gathered underneath a fingernail, — Caitlin Doughty

Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. — Henry David Thoreau

Nature is man's inorganic body
that is to say, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature
i.e., nature is his body
and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it is he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. — Karl Marx

In the range of inorganic nature. I doubt if any object can be found more perfectly beautiful than a fresh, deep snowdrift, seen under warm light. — John Ruskin

Books have no life; they lack feeling maybe, and perhaps cannot feel pain, as animals and even plants feel pain. But what proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived? — Elias Canetti

My best 'inorganic friend' is science! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

When I was in power, I found that experts can't be trusted. For this simple reason: unlike tyrants, they are under no delusion that a country, a people is their body. Under this delusion a tyrant takes everything personally. An expert takes nothing personally. Nothing is ever precisely his fault. If a bridge collapses, or a war miscarries, he has already walked away. He still has his expertise. Also,
people imagine that because a thing is big, it has had a great deal of intelligent thought given to it. This is not true. A big idea is even more apt to be wrong than a small one, because the scale is inorganic. The Great Wall, for instance, is extremely stupid. The two biggest phenomena in the world right now are Maoism and American television, and both are extremely stupid. — John Updike

Physiology is the science which treats of the properties of organic bodies, animal and vegetable, of the phenomena they present, and of the laws which govern their actions. Inorganic substances are the objects of other sciences, - physics and chemistry. — Johannes P. Muller

Organic chemistry is the study of organs; inorganic chemistry is the study of the insides of organs. — Max Shulman

Self-destructive behaviors do not exist because there is a force within us that tries to hasten our return to an inorganic state; they exist because they provide short-term relief from pain that threatens to become intolerable. — David L. Conroy

Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited even in the phenomena of organic life. — Chauncey Wright

Modern physics had shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. For modern physicists ... Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter. — Fritjof Capra

Among the things most characteristic of organisms--most distinctive of living as opposed to inorganic systems--is a sort of directedness. Their structures and activities have an adaptedness, an evident and vital usefulness to the organism. Darwin's answer and ours is to accept the common sense view...[that] the end ("telos") [is] that the individual and the species may survive. But this end is (usually) unconscious and impersonal. Naive teleology is controverted not by ignoring the obvious existence of such ends but by providing a naturalistic, materialistic explanation of the adaptive characteristics serving them. [Book review in "Science," 1959, p. 673.] — George Gaylord Simpson

The tides of time should be able to imprint the passing of the years on an object. The physical decay or natural wear and tear of the materials used does not in the least detract from the visual appeal, rather it adds to it. It is the changes of texture and colour that provide the space for the imagination to enter and become more involved with the devolution of the piece. Whereas modern design often uses inorganic materials to defy the natural ageing effects of time, wabi sabi embraces them and seeks to use this transformation as an integral part of the whole. This is not limited to the process of decay, but can also be found at the moment of inception, when life is taking its first fragile steps toward becoming. — Andrew Juniper