Living Cells Quotes & Sayings

Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that's so big we forget it's there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to a fish. We are cells in the body of a three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system. — Grant Morrison

All bodies have spirits and pneumatical parts within them; but the main differences between animate and inanimate, are two: the first is, that the spirit of things animate are all contained within themselves, and are branched in veins and secret canals, as blood is; and, in living creatures, the spirits have not only branches, but certain cells or seats, where the principal spirits do reside, and whereunto the rest do resort: but the spirits in things inanimate are shut in, and cut off by the tangible parts, and are not pervious one to another, as air is in snow.Bacon'sNatural History,No 601. — Samuel Johnson

.....we find ourselves inhabitants of the last few living cells of a dying god — Billy Kazee

At the end of the 1970s, I was a young researcher at the Weizmann Institute with an ambitious plan to shed light on one of the major outstanding questions concerning living cells: the process of protein biosynthesis. — Ada Yonath

There is no clear distinction anywhere on the Earth's surface between living and nonliving matter. There is merely a hierarchy of intensity going from the 'material' environment of the rocks and the atmosphere to the living cells. — James Lovelock

But as the world turns I learned life is Hell / Living in the world, no different from a cell — Inspectah Deck

Man is a part of the world, and his spirit is part of the spirit of the world. We are merely a peculiar mode of Being, a living atom within it, or, rather, a cell that, if sufficiently open to itself and its own mystery, can also experience the mystery, the will, the pain, and the hope of the world. — Vaclav Havel

The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle. — Michael Denton

In its most primitive form, life is, therefore, no longer bound to the cell, the cell which possesses structure and which can be compared to a complex wheel-work, such as a watch which ceases to exist if it is stamped down in a mortar. No, in its primitive form life is like fire, like a flame borne by the living substance;-like a flame which appears in endless diversity and yet has specificity within it;-which can adopt the form of the organic world, of the lank grass-leaf and of the stem of the tree. — Martinus Beijerinck

Girls are better at this sort of labour, often called 'emotional labour', not because there's anything in the meat and matter of our living cells that makes us naturally better but because we're trained for it from birth. Trained to make other people feel good. Trained to serve the coffee, fill in the forms, organise the parties and wipe the table afterwards. Trained to be feisty, if we must, but not strong. To be bubbly, not funny. You must at no stage appear to have a body that functions in a normal human way, that pisses and shits and sweats and farts and falters. Decorate the prison of your body. Make yourself useful. Shut up and smile. — Laurie Penny

Oments of transport, and of comfort, and of a bracing vastness of possibility. That was all there for me sometimes when I plunged my mind into the Bible's puzzles; and it was always there in the music of church. I wouldn't have said it this way then. But I would feel all the cells in my body as I sang hymns that connected my little life with the grandeur of the cosmos, the Christian drama across space and time. This was my earliest experience of breath and body, mind and spirit soaring together, alive to both mystery and reality, in kinship with others both familiar and unknown. That's one way I'd define the feeling of faith now. — Krista Tippett

Any living cell carries with it the experience of a billion years of experimentation by its ancestors. — Max Delbruck

Our responsibility, as individual cells of a living organism, is to perform our individual functions as well as possible. Our orders come from within; they are not imposed from without. We are free to be ourselves, as fully as we can; and the more we are ourselves, the better we will be functioning, and the more satisfaction we will feel. Our lives grow richer and richer as the health of the total organism improves. Our destiny is unimaginably high. — Paul S. Williams

Surely the mitochondrion that first entered another cell was not thinking about the future benefits of cooperation and integration; it was merely trying to make its own living in a tough Darwinian world — Stephen Jay Gould

When the next generation of content is developed, we have to think in a totally different way. Think about it more symbolically. The main story that you see on the TV screen is maybe like the living room of a house. But there are various other rooms in this house that you will otherwise never see. But if you use the Internet, you find out what's in the attic. And if you use the cell phone, you find out what's on the first floor. And on another medium, you find out what's in the cellar. — Cyriac Roeding

Henrietta's cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it, — Rebecca Skloot

If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that. — Joshua Lederberg

This is a dark time, filled with suffering and uncertainty. Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don't be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, because these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings. — Joanna Macy

Through all the ages the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiter - every form of iniquity: from exile to disfranchisement to expropriation - every form of torture: from sneers to rack to firing squad - have been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking at the world through the eyes of a living consciousness and performing the crucial act of a rational connection. Yet only to the extent to which - in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders - some men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive. — Ayn Rand

The Bible is not primarily a written or printed text to be scrutinized in private, in a scholar's study or a contemplative cell. It is a body of oral messages, announcements, prophecies, promulgations, recitals, histories, songs of praise, lamentations, etc., which are meant either to be uttered or at least read aloud, or chanted, or sung, or recited in a community convoked for the purpose of a living celebration. — Thomas Merton

The tyranny of the living body.
Listen -- those cells are at it again.
Gossiping.
Her veins are singing.
Belting out gospel and disco. Amazing Grace.
And her tired mind
says hush. Enough is enough. — Eve Alexandra

One of the great things about working on C. elegans was the fact that it was transparent, and so when I first heard that seminar describing GFP, and realised, 'I work on this transparent animal, this is going to be terrific! I'll be able to see the cells within the living animal.' — Martin Chalfie

The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating. — Paul Davies

On the other hand technology brings within your reach the great
therapy of music; this activates the inner living cells of your
body, stimulates the energy of the inner self and helps to unite
the conscious mind with the other portions of your being. — Seth

Most people think of viruses as parasites, but they aren't parasites at all. An organism has to be considered alive to be classified as a parasite. Viruses don't do any of things living organisms do. They don't grow, they can't move on their own, and they don't metabolize. They don't even have cells. But the one thing a virus is very good at is reproducing. When it finds a suitable host cell, it attaches itself and injects its DNA through the cell's plasma wall. The virus's genes are transcribed into the host cell's DNA, and the host cell's genetic code is rewritten. Whatever its job was before, its new job is to do nothing but produce copies of the original virus, usually until it's created so many that the cell bursts open and spreads the infection. — Christian Cantrell

Just one living cell in the human body is, more complex than New York City. — Linus Pauling

Eating is more than a fix, it's nature's way to nourish cells -- it's a way to extend life. Don't give a natural body unnatural food. — Nancy S. Mure

We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Every living cell in your body is made from the food you eat. If you consistently eat junk food then you'll have a junk body. — Jeanette Jenkins

As was predicted at the beginning of the Human Genome Project, getting the sequence will be the easy part as only technical issues are involved. The hard part will be finding out what it means, because this poses intellectual problems of how to understand the participation of the genes in the functions of living cells. — Sydney Brenner

We divorced ourselves from the materials of the earth, the rock, the wood, the iron ore; we looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we called plastic. They had no odor of the living, ... their touch was alien to nature ... [They proliferated] like the matastases of cancer cells. — Norman Mailer

Perhaps we are like cells in the mind of God, contributing to celestial functions beyond our ken, just as our cells unknowingly fashion our thoughts and actions. Perhaps the laws of nature order and constrain even the living and eternal Deity from which they spring, and of which they are a part. — Robert Christian

Above all, however, resist the temptation to cover the entire room in foam--I can't tell you how often college studios in particular succumb to this seductive error. It is quite simply a recipe for disaster, because it hoovers up the top half of the room's reverberation, making for an extremely unnatural working environment. Although it makes good sense to damp down strong early reflections that can potentially comb filter your frequency response, you also want your monitoring environment to bear at least a passing resemblance to real-world living rooms and offices. If you plaster your whole studio in foam, you'll basically be mixing for people in padded cells--perhaps not the most lucrative demographic to set your sights on! — Mike Senior

Cancer cells are fixed at an age where they are still too young to have learned the rules of the society in which they live. As with so many immature individuals of all living kinds, everything they do is excessive and uncoordinated with the needs or constraints of their neighbors ... they are reproductive but not productive. — Sherwin B. Nuland

We will not meet our maker inside a world that we have made..."

We cannot truly know ourselves without knowing the living Earth, for it is the ground of our being. The fire of the sun burns within our cells. The wind gives us life with each breath, and our blood reflects the chemical composition of the great oceans. Every molecule of our bodies has come from the natural world.

Nature is the visible face of the spirit, and our nature and spirit will only be found within, and not apart from her. — Sparrow Hart

A German and two American scientists won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday for smashing the size barrier in optical microscopes, allowing researchers to see individual molecules inside living cells. — Anonymous

Just tell us," Harding said, bent over the wound. "Darwin had no idea ... " "That life is so unbelievably complex," Malcolm said. "Nobody realizes it. I mean, a single fertilized egg has a hundred thousand genes, which act in a coordinated way, switching on and off at specific times, to transform that single cell into a complete living creature. That one cell starts to divide, but the subsequent cells are different. They specialize. Some are nerve. Some are gut. Some are limb. Each set of cells begins to follow its own program, developing, interacting. Eventually there are two hundred and fifty different kinds of cells, all developing together, at exactly the right time. Just when the organism needs a circulatory system, the heart starts pumping. Just when hormones are needed, the adrenals start to make them. Week after week, this unimaginably complex development proceeds perfectly - perfectly. It's incredible. No human activity comes close. — Michael Crichton

Your emotions are your inner guidance system. They alone will let you know whether you are living in an environment of biochemical health or in an environment of biochemical distress. Understanding how your thoughts and your emotions affect every single hormone and cell in your body, and knowing how to change them in a way that is health-enhancing, gives you access to the most powerful and empowering health-creating secret on earth. — Christiane Northrup

Dear brothers and sisters, the Church loves you! Be an active presence in the community, as living cells, as living stones. — Pope Francis

Cell division allows us as organisms to grow, to adapt, to recover, to repair - to live. And distorted and unleashed, it allows cancer cells to grow, to flourish, to adapt, to recover, and to repair - to live at the cost of our living. Cancer cells grow faster, adapt better. They are more perfect versions of ourselves. — Anonymous

Cellular pathology is not an end if one cannot see any alteration in the cell. Chemistry brings the clarification of living processes nearer than does anatomy. Each anatomical change must have been preceded by a chemical one. — Rudolf Virchow

Are you doing what your heart desires, or living up to society's expectations, what friends and family think?
Because the moment you start doing what you love, what you truly feel in your heart, all your cells start working for you. — Ralph Smart

The research I have been doing - studying how foodstuffs yield energy in living cells - does not lead to the kind of knowledge that can be expected to give immediate practical benefits to mankind. If I have chosen this field of study, it was because I believed in its importance in spite of its theoretical character. — Hans Adolf Krebs

Each of our cells is a living entity, and the main thing that influences them is our blood. If I open my eyes in the morning and my beautiful partner is in front of me, my perception causes a release of oxytocin, dopamine, growth hormones - all of which encourage the growth and health of my cells. But if I see a saber tooth tiger, I'm going to release stress hormones which change the cells to a protection mode. People need to realize that their thoughts are more primary than their genes, because the environment, which is influenced by our thoughts, controls the genes. — Bruce H. Lipton

In my experience of living, for a time, in the underbelly of society, I spent a lot of time in various holding cells. — Natasha Lyonne

I took up space. I was a collection of cells and memories, awkward limbs and clumsy fashion crimes; I was the repository of my parents' expectations and evidence of their disappointments — Robin Wasserman

Buchner proposed that fermentation was carried out by biological catalysts that he named enzymes (from the Greek en zyme, meaning in yeast). He concluded that living cells are chemical factories, in which enzymes manufacture the various products. — Nick Lane

When the finely tuned balance among the different parts of bodies breaks down, the individual creature can die. A cancerous tumor, for example, is born when one batch of cells no longer cooperates with others. By dividing endlessly, or by failing to die properly, these cells can destroy the necessary balance that makes a living individual person. Cancers break the rules that allow cells to cooperate with one another. Like bullies who break cooperative societies, cancers behave in their own best interest until they kill their larger community, the human body. — Neil Shubin

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

We are here because over billions of years, countless variables fell into place, any of which could have taken another path. We are essentially a beautiful fluke, as are the millions of other species with which we share this planet. Our cells are composed of atoms and dust particles from distant galaxies, and from the billions of living organisms that inhabited this planet before us. — Wendy Mass

There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick. — Annie Dillard

I crush her against me. I want to be part of her. Not just inside her but all around her. I want our rib cages to crack open and our hearts to migrate and merge. I want our cells to braid together like living thread. — Isaac Marion

The initiation of the fermentation process does not require so complicated an apparatus as is represented by the living cell. The agent responsible for the fermenting action of the press juice is rather to be regarded as a dissolved substance, doubtless a protein; this will be denoted zymase. — Eduard Buchner

There are living systems; there is no living "matter." No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell. — Jacques Monod

In the last few years, we've learned that the formation and maintenance of categories have their roots in known biological processes in the brain. Neurons are living cells, and they can connect to one another in trillions of different ways. These connections don't just lead to learning - the connections are the learning. The number of possible brain states that each of us can have is so large that it exceeds the number of known particles in the universe. The implications of this are mind-boggling: Theoretically, you should be able to represent uniquely in your brain every known particle in the universe, and have excess capacity left over to organize those particles into finite categories. Your brain is just the tool for the information age. — Daniel J. Levitin

Each of us is a universe of our living cells. — Toba Beta

We evolved living in more sunlight than today. We make our own vitamin D when sunlight hits our skin cells. Many people living in the northern hemisphere, however, suffer from lower levels of vitamin D during the fall, winter and spring. — Paul Stamets

Cell genetics led us to investigate cell mechanics. Cell mechanics now compels us to infer the structures underlying it. In seeking the mechanism of heredity and variation we are thus discovering the molecular basis of growth and reproduction. The theory of the cell revealed the unity of living processes; the study of the cell is beginning to reveal their physical foundations. — C.D. Darlington

As Aristotle put it, the beginning of philosophy is wonder. I am simply amazed to find myself living on a ball of rock that swings around an immense spherical fire. I am more amazed that I am a maze - a complex wiggliness, an arabesque of tubes, filaments, cells, fibers, and films that are various kinds of palpitation in this stream of liquid energy. — Alan W. Watts

Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be. — Bill Bryson

The nucleic acids, as constituents of living organisms, are comparable In importance to proteins. There is evidence that they are Involved In the processes of cell division and growth, that they participate In the transmission of hereditary characters, and that they are important constituents of viruses. An understanding of the molecular structure of the nucleic acids should be of value In the effort to understand the fundamental phenomena of life. — Linus Pauling

The more we understand what happens in living cells, the more incredibly powerful you realize things can be when they work from the bottom up, by interaction of one molecule and another. — Richard Smalley

Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in the case of viruses. They can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact with a living system, they switch on and multiply. (194) — Richard Preston

Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world. — Michael Denton

Beyond natural history Other biological sciences take up the study at other levels of organization: dissecting the individual into organs and tissues and seeing how these work together, as in physiology; reaching down still further to the level of cells, as in cytology; and reaching the final biological level with the study of living molecules and their interactions, as in biochemistry. No one of these levels can be considered as more important than any other. — Marston Bates

Living cells must have food in the form of sugar, they must breathe, and they must grow, at least a little. But without leaves-and therefore without photosynthesis-that's impossible. No being on the planet can maintain a centuries-long fast, not even the remains of a tree, and certainly not a stump that has had to survive on its own. It was clear that something else was happening with this stump. It must be getting assistance from neighboring trees, specifically from their roots. Scientists investigating similar situations have discovered that assistance may either be delivered remotely by fungal networks around the root tips-which facilitate nutrient exchange between trees-or the roots themselves may be interconnected. In the case of the stump I had stumbled upon, I couldn't find out what was going on, because I didn't want to injure the old stump by digging around it, but one thing was clear: the surrounding beeches were pumping sugar to the stump to keep it alive. — Peter Wohlleben

...you have to bear witness to your dead. You simply have to. You have to step into their energy field of whatever remains of their spirit, their soul, their essence and let it pass through your body. And in the passing, maybe a wisp of it adheres to you, grafts itself to your cells. And in this communion, the dead continue to live. Or strive to. — Dennis Lehane

Day wouldn't have understood the concept of immortal cells or HLA markers coming from anyone, accent or not - he'd only gone to school for four years of his life, and he'd never studied science. The only kind of cell he'd heard of was the kind Zakariyya was living in out at Hagerstown. So he did what he'd always done when he didn't understand something a doctor said: he nodded and said yes. — Rebecca Skloot

DNA is the master blueprint for life and constitutes the genetic material in all free-living organisms and most viruses. RNA is the genetic material of certain viruses, but it is also found in all living cells, where it plays an important role in certain processes such as the making of proteins. — Richard J. Roberts

We are learning that the earth functions like an invisible organism. We are the various cells of one living being. Those who work to save the earth are its antibodies. — Jeremy Rifkin

This was a living flow, like a pulse through veins, with the cells bursting and renewing themselves as they went. The sudden vision filled her with strong emotions that embarrassed her, for fear of breaking into sobs as she had in front of her in-laws that day when the butterflies enveloped her. How was that even normal, to cry over insects? — Barbara Kingsolver

The woman who undergoes this operation can sense the morphogenetic field at work in her face. She can feel the lines of force as they guide the embryonic cells into the patterns they must form. Why should a woman let her life be determined by tired collagens or by a shortage of zinc which weakens her electromagnetic field, the matrix of life? The goal of life is living. Life is a field of opportunity, guiding the individual forward along paths created by the meshed forces or objective possibilities as they interweave with a person's own potentialities. And this philosophy of life is now bodied forth in the faces of beautiful women. (Motherhood — William S. Wilson

In terms of their basic biochemical design ... no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth. — Michael Denton

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. — Michael Denton

We're living among infinite possibilities. And the prevalent philosophies of post-modernist pessimism that come out of the universities are really a major tragedy. The opportunities for progress and change ... are absolutely tremendous. Anybody who tells you that we're running out of resources or in a terrible mess
they are idiots. We can't run out of resources. Resources exist when the human mind sees how to use something. To say we are running out of resources is like saying we are running out of brain cells. — Robert Anton Wilson

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. — Dr. Seuss

One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones. In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads. When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are ... they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded. We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere. — Alan Lightman

You go to London, you see a TV set in every cell and the sign up that all the officers must treat prisoners with dignity. What about your dedicated soldiers that have helped fight in Afghanistan and Iraq? They're living in tents and our soldiers are living in tents. So it's OK for soldiers to live in tents, in hot tents, but it's wrong for inmates? — Joe Arpaio

As a progressive discipline [biochemistry] belongs to the present century. From the experimental physiologists of the last century it obtained a charter, and, from a few pioneers of its own, a promise of success; but for the furtherance of its essential aim that century left it but a small inheritance of facts and methods. By its essential or ultimate aim I myself mean an adequate and acceptable description of molecular dynamics in living cells and tissues. — Frederick Gowland Hopkins

The gifts of microscopes to our understanding of cells and organisms is so profound that one has to ask: What are the gifts of the microscopist? Here is my opinion. The gift of the great microscopist is the ability to Think with the eyes and see with the brain. Deep revelations into the nature of living things continue to travel on beams of light. — Daniel Mazia

Each cell of a living organism cooperates with the cell next to it. It does not need any sentiment or declarations of undying love to do so. Each cell is wise enough to know that if its neighbour goes, it also goes. The cells stick together not out of brotherhood, love and that kind of thing, but out of the urgent drive to survive. It is the same with us, but only in a larger scale. Soon we will all come to know one simple thing: if I try to destroy you, I will also be destroyed. — U.G. Krishnamurti

Humanity shares a common ancestry with all living things on Earth. We often share especially close intimacies with the microbial world. In fact, only a small percentage of the cells in the human body are human at all. Yet, the common biology and biochemistry that unites us also makes us susceptible to contracting and transmitting infectious disease. — Brenda Wilmoth Lerner