Quotes & Sayings About Molecules

Molecule Trustees: The sun and all of us are molecule trustees, administering the molecules entrusted to us until they are passed on. Like any trustee, we do not own the property, nor do we decide who will receive what we stewarded. It might be somebody grumpy like Xanthippe. — Amy Leach

Biological behavior can be controlled by invisible forces, including thought, as well as it can be controlled by physical molecules like penicillin, a fact that provides the scientific underpinning for pharmaceutical-free energy medicine. — Bruce H. Lipton

The principle of [divine] purpose ... stares the biologist in the face wherever he looks ... The probability for such an event as the origin of DNA molecules to have occurred by sheer chance is just too small to be seriously considered. — Ernst Boris Chain

That's the problem with all of this. No matter how hard I try, I can't make it perfect. I can't keep it in a bottle, can't ignore reality. Chemicals are involved, the kind scientists try to synthesize and put into pill form, and they're making tremendous advances every day. They're winning the war against love. It's probably inevitable now. There are only two ways to see the world: either no one and nothing is connected to anything, or we are all a random series of carbon molecules connected to each other. Tell me if there's room for love in either of those scenarios. — Pete Wentz

I must confess that, at that time, I had absolutely no knowledge of the slowness of the relaxation processes in the ground state, processes which take place in collisions with the wall or with the molecules of a foreign gas. — Alfred Kastler

I have lived much of my life among molecules. They are good company. — George Wald

Broadly speaking, the discovery of X-rays has increased the keenness of our vision ten thousand times, and we can now 'see' the individual atoms and molecules. — William Henry Bragg

Over the long term, however, too much adrenaline produces scarring on the insides of your blood vessels. These scars become magnets for molecules to accumulate, creating lumps called plaques. These can grow large enough to block the blood vessels. If it happens in the blood vessels of your heart, you get a heart attack; in your brain, you get a stroke. — John Medina

I'm frequently asked, "Do you believe there's extraterrestrial intelligence?" I give the standard arguments- there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on. Then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it.
Often, I'm asked next, "What do you really think?"
I say, "I just told you what I really think."
"Yes, but what's your gut feeling?"
But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in. — Carl Sagan

Of course, human tissue completely It's unlikely that scar was composed of the same molecules. Do you think it is really appropriate to consider people to be the same entity they were seven years earlier? Because, physically, they're not. They're connected but every part has changed. Like a renovated house. It seems like after seven years you should not be liable for things you did before. Why should a man be imprisoned for a crime committed by a different physical entity? Should we expect a couple to stay married when they barely share a molecule with the people who said 'I do'? I don't think so. — Max Barry

Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid.
In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*! — Alastair Reynolds

The human body is constantly undergoing a process of decay and of reconstruction. First builded into the astral form in the womb of the mother, it is built up continually by the insetting of fresh materials. With every moment tiny molecules are passing away from it; with every moment tiny molecules are streaming into it. — Annie Besant

Molecules are moving. Universes are colliding. Generations are being born and dying simultaneously, throughout eternity. As one of our great American poets, Walt Whitman, once said: "I contain multitudes." — Frederick Lenz

The physical relationship between CO2 molecules and the atmosphere and the trapping of heat is as well-established as gravity, for God's sakes. It's not some mystery. — Al Gore

Creativity comes from the spiritual realm, the collective consciousness. And the mind is in a different realm than the molecules of the brain. The brain is a receiver, not a source. — Candace Pert

Agarikon contains antiviral molecules new to science. Researchers for pharmaceutical companies may have missed its potent antiviral properties. Our analyses show that the mycelial cultures of this mushroom are most active but that the fruitbodies, the natural form of the mushroom, are not. — Paul Stamets

You can be okay here, Tash. If you're getting tangled up in history, then you need to turn around, babe. You're looking backwards." He bent down, bringing his mouth to hers, leaving nothing but a few molecules between them. "Turn around, babe. See me. — Susan Fanetti

Something was happening to the five, however. Battered by the chance collision of several billion molecules, the die flipped onto a point, spun gently and came down a seven. Blind Io picked up the cube and counted the sides. "Come on," he said wearily. "Play fair. — Terry Pratchett

The molecules that allow microbes to catch their prey and hold on to them are likely candidates for the molecules that form the rivet attachments between cells in our bodies. — Neil Shubin

As I grew older and when I became wiser, I realized that not only are we made of molecules, we are also governed and ruled by them. We are just molecular slaves in this vast limitless creation. — Biju Vasudevan

From the time I learned to love Jade and was drawn into the life of the Butterfield house, straight through to the wait for my case to come before the judge, there was nothing in my life that wasn't alive with meaning, that wasn't capable of suggesting weird and hidden significances, that didn't carry with it the undertaste of what for lack of anything better to call it I'll call The Infinite. If being in love is to be suddenly united with the most unruly, the most outrageously alive part of yourself, this state of piercing consciousness did not subside in me, as I've learned it does in others, after a time. If my mind could have made a sound, it would have burst a row of wineglasses. I saw coincidences everywhere; meanings darted and danced like overheated molecules. Everything was terrifyingly complex; everything was terrifyingly simple. Nothing went unnoticed and everything carried with it a kind of drama. — Scott Spencer

Originally, the atoms of carbon from which we're made were floating in the air, part of a carbon dioxide molecule. The only way to recruit these carbon atoms for the molecules necessary to support life - the carbohydrates, amino acids, proteins, and lipids - is by means of photosynthesis. Using sunlight as a catalyst the green cells of plants combine carbon atoms taken from the air with water and elements drawn from the soil to form the simple organic compounds that stand at the base of every food chain. It is more than a figure of speech to say that plants create life out of thin air. — Michael Pollan

OMG. He's a gift shop, a lamb kebab with mint,/a solar panel poetry machine with biceps. He's the path/through the dark woods, the light on the page, a postcard/from the castle and a one-way ticket there. He's the most/astounding arrangement of molecules ever!/Just look at those tights! An honest-to-God prince at last. — Ron Koertge

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment ... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it. — Alfred North Whitehead

Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation. — Paul Kalanithi

Even while it's true that we are tied to our molecules and proteins and neurons - as strokes and hormones and drugs and microorganisms indisputably tell us - it does not logically follow that humans are best described only as pieces and parts. — David Eagleman

Rather surprisingly, to anyone who is most familiar with textbook mitochondria, many simple single-celled eukaryotes have mitochondria that operate in the absence of oxygen. Instead of using oxygen to burn up food, these 'anaerobic' mitochondria use other simple compounds like nitrate or nitrite. In most other respects, they operate in a very similar fashion to our own mitochondria, and are unquestionably related. So the spectrum stretches from aerobic mitochondria like our own, which are dependent on oxygen, through 'anaerobic' mitochondria, which prefer to use other molecules like nitrates, to the hydrogenosomes, which work rather differently but are still related. — Nick Lane

Man, the molecule of society, is the subject of social science. — Henry Charles Carey

As the craft re-entered earth's atmosphere, it was coming in so fast, it heated up the surrounding atoms and molecules, and they became positively and negatively charged, and highly reactive, and began luminescing all around us. — Helen Sharman

When you're dancing the mystical dance of the molecules, you're not the one who's leading. — Jane Wagner

Astrobiologists now believe that the existence of life throughout the universe requires: 1. a source of energy; 2. a type of atom that allows complex structures to exist; 3. a liquid solvent in which molecules can float and interact; and 4. sufficient time for life to arise and to evolve. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended.
What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at
rest and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction.
Time, 'too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to
then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks, faces,
flowers. — Susanna Kaysen

People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so. — Kary Mullis

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

The actual atoms and molecules that make up my brain and body today are not the same ones that I was born with on September 8, 1954, a half-century ago this month. — Michael Shermer

A teacher (a good teacher) is composed of molecules of education and intelligence, bonded together by patience and passion. — Laurie Halse Anderson

It has been recognized that hydrogen bonds restrain protein molecules to their native configurations, and I believe that as the methods of structural chemistry are further applied to physiological problems it will be found that the significance of the hydrogen bond for physiology is greater than that of any other single structural feature. — Linus Pauling

Eventually I realised there must be a way by playing with the molecules; trying to turn the molecules on and off allows you to see adjacent things you couldn't see before. — Stefan Hell

Your body, which is bonding millions of molecules every second, depends on transformation. Breathing and digestion harness transformation. Food and air aren't just shuffled about but, rather, undergo the exact chemical bonding needed to keep you alive. The sugar extracted from an orange travels to the brain and fuels a thought. The emergent property in this case is the newness of the thought; no molecules in the history of the universe ever combined to produce that exact thought. — Deepak Chopra

Alcohol
I once visited a supermarket that had a petition to allow it to sell alcohol. I signed the petition telling the check-out girl that clouds of alcohol molecules were the largest objects in the galaxy, some five billion times the mass of our sun, and that it was from such clouds that worlds and stars were formed.
To which the check-out girl replied: "You're not from around here are you. — Bo Fowler

You might think of the barrier between fiction and reality as being a bit like a blood-brain barrier, which allows only some kinds of molecules to pass from the bloodstream into the brain. Emotions can easily pass from the fictional world into the real one, so that fiction can feel as if it were real. But BELIEFS are blocked. We KNOW the events have no bearing in the real world. — Greg Carlson

On one planet [earth], and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules that would normally make nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, gather themselves together into chunks of rock-sized matter of such staggering complexity that they are capable of running, jumping, swimming, flying, seeing, hearing, capturing and eating other such animated chunks of complexity; capable in some cases of thinking and feeling, and falling in love with yet other chunks of complex matter. — Richard Dawkins

I'm exchanging molecules every 30 days with the natural world and in a spiritual sense I know I am a part of it and take my photographs from that emotional feeling within me, rather than from an emotional distance as a spectator. — Galen Rowell

Then the molecules bestowed upon the seeker "the curse of progress". Progress was something by which man could make his society progressively more iniquitous and unjust and thereby feel more miserable. The other life forms never deviated from what Mother Nature had endowed them with. The seeker had to run faster than his designed speed to achieve progress while the lower creations, who never desired any progress, maintained their designed speed. Going faster than the design is surely going to have a deleterious effect on the engine and the chassis. You cannot send a bullock cart to space and expect it to retrieve a lost satellite. And that was what that exactly happened. — Biju Vasudevan

In order for life to have appeared spontaneously on Earth, there first had to be hundreds of millions of protein molecules of the Ninth Configuration. But, given the size of the planet Earth, do you know how long it would take for just one of these protein molecules to appear by chance? Roughly 10 to the 243rd power, billions of years; and I find that far, far more fantastic than simply believing in a god. — William Peter Blatty

Overwhelms you with tingling excitement give you pleasure because of internal molecules. Some researchers believe that thrills occur when molecules called endorphins are released. A drug called naloxone blocks those molecules and prevents music from inspiring — Robert E. Svoboda

A hole in one is amazing when you think of the different universes this white mass of molecules has to pass through on its way to the hole. — Mac O'Grady

Here at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, we have genetically rearranged various viruses and bacteria as part of our medical research. In fact, we have been able to create entirely new types of DNA molecules by splicing together the genetic information from different organisms - recombinant DNA. — James D. Watson

You still secretly believe that there is an element of magic to this world? It's all just soulless molecules bouncing against each other randomly. — John Green

The atoms may be compared to the letters of the alphabet, which can be put together into innumerable ways to form words. So the atoms are combined in equal variety to form what are called molecules. — William Henry Bragg

You might as well ask a man to eat molecules with a pair of chop-sticks, as to try to interest me, about the lesser carnivora, when I know of what is before me. — Bram Stoker

Oil and coal? Of course, it's a fungible commodity and they don't flag, you know, the molecules, where it's going and where it's not [ ... ]. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do, also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it's Americans that get stuck to holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. — Sarah Palin

Douady and Hubbard used a brilliant chain of new mathematics to prove that every floating molecule does indeed hang on a filigree that binds it to all the rest, a delicate web springing from tiny outcroppings on the main set, a "devil's polymer," in Mandelbrot's phrase. The mathematicians proved that any segment-no matter where, and no matter how small-would, when blown up by the computer microscope, reveal new molecules, each resembling the main set and yet not quite the same. Every new molecule would be surrounded by its own spirals and flame-like projections, and those, inevitably, would reveal molecules tinier still, always similar, never identical, fulfilling some mandate of infinite variety, a miracle of miniaturization in which every new detail was sure to be a universe of its own, diverse and entire. — James Gleick

The Universal mind is not only intelligence, but it is substance, and this substance is the attractive force which brings electrons together by the law of attraction so they form atoms; the atoms in turn are brought together by the same law and form molecules; molecules take objective forms and so we find that the law is the creative force behind every manifestation, not only of atoms, but of worlds, of the universe, of everything of which the imagination can form any conception. — Charles F. Haanel

Compare ... the various quantities of the same element contained in the molecule of the free substance and in those of all its different compounds and you will not be able to escape the following law: The different quantities of the same element contained in different molecules are all whole multiples of one and the same quantity, which always being entire, has the right to be called an atom. — Stanislao Cannizzaro

The relentless invisible storm of radio signals and electronic particles, the hustle and bustle, and the billions of petrol explosions in the engine blocks of trucks and cars seem to churn up the molecules of life and heaven so violently that the beautiful fogs are unable to hold together like they once did. — Michael Leunig

Everything in the universe exists because of a force between gasses and gravity like when we die we decompose because our gasses reflects off the walls of our body and every time it reflects it gains a little speed and eventually gains enough force to cause an unbalanced force in the gravity disrupting out magnetic fields that holds all our atoms together and our atoms disperse into the atmosphere and like when you blow up a balloon the gas molecules reflects off the walls of the balloon causing an unbalanced force in the gravity disrupting its magnetic field that holds all its atoms together and the atoms disperse into the atmoshere — Jordan Brown

(50 liters of O2 makes 100 liters of molecules that only have one O each). — Andy Weir

As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it. — Bill Bryson

Those are some of the things that molecules do, given four billion years of evolution — Carl Sagan

So let men turn their telescopes on the heavens and their microscopes on the molecules. Let them probe and search and tabulate and name and find and discover. I can dare to say to them, "I know the One who made all this. I'm personally acquainted with the One who made it. — A.W. Tozer

The palimpsests of molecules need not be overwritten, for machines make once-ephemeral words persist: they collect in gutters; they pile up and require sweeping; they hang in air like morning fog. — Dexter Palmer

Four elements, Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, also provide an example of the astonishing togetherness of our universe. They make up the "organic" molecules that constitute living organisms on a planet, and the nuclei of these same elements interact to generate the light of its star. Then the organisms on the planet come to depend wholly on that starlight, as they must if life is to persist. So it is that all life on the Earth runs on sunlight. [Referring to photosynthesis] — George Wald

Ever wondered why people from the tropical regions cannot imagine a life without coconuts? Since coconut makes an everyday special food for the tropics, there are a number of reasons why it makes the major ingredient in their daily consumption. So what's the miracle in coconut or coconut oil? To put it simply, coconut oil is the most unique oil among all the rest. This is the main reason why it has gained immense popularity around the world. The factor that makes coconut oil unique is the unusual level of fat molecules found in this miracle oil. Too technical to understand? Let's learn about it in detail. All fats — Dogwood Apps

If there is as a continuum from self-reproducing molecules, such as DNA, to microbes, and an evolutionary sequence continuum from microbes to humans, why should we imagine that continuum to stop at humans? — Carl Sagan

Our world isn't made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language. — Tom Robbins

SCHOOL BEGINS IN August this year. I live nearby, and so I walk and skip the bus. I read while I walk to school up the two hills, one sidewalk, a more or less straight line. I pretend the streets I pass through are empty. I have been reading about the Neutron Bomb. I want to be like that, radiant and deadly, a ghost of an impact, to pass through walls, to kill everyone, in flight among the empty houses, punching through molecules like a knife through a paper bag. See me. I am five feet and two inches tall. I am still thin, freckled, large eyes, small nose. My hair waves and grows long, to my neck. I pick flowers for my mother as I walk. The neighborhood kids call me Nature Boy. I want to die. Help — Alexander Chee

We breathe in, we breathe out. We inhale and exhale the same molecules. We are natural recyclers of the same energy, whether or not we realize it. — Catherine Carrigan

Whether we electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular. — Werner Heisenberg

Our young people - and adults - should be aware that considerable dissent exists in the scientific world regarding the validity of molecules-to-man evolution. — Ken Ham

I don't believe everything happens for a reason. But I still search for reasons anyway. It's like I don't want to admit that maybe everything really is totally random ... that people are just molecules in the air, bumping into each other and floating away again.
-p150, NOTES TO SELF — Avery Sawyer

I love being a carbon molecule. — Duncan Trussell

No. The answer was no, I was not all right. I nearly got knocked out. Knocked out by desire! Desire for forbidden dissimilar molecules — Meg Cabot

Mainly I study the sense of touch and what the molecules are that transduce touch. And I use mutants in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to look at that problem. — Martin Chalfie

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

This simple idea served to provide information on the geometrical shape of reacting molecules, and I was able to make the role of the frontier orbitals in chemical reactions more distinct through visualization, by drawing their diagrams. — Kenichi Fukui

It's hard to say goodbye for good at any time or any place. It's harder still to say it through a meshed wire. It crisscrossed his face into little diagonals, gave me only little broken-up molecules of it at a time. It stenciled a cold, rigid frame around every kiss. — Cornell Woolrich

On Titan the molecules that have been raining down like manna from heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be there largely unaltered deep-frozen awaiting the chemists from Earth — Carl Sagan

Every thought, feeling, and emotion creates a molecule known as a neuropeptide. Neuropeptides travel throughout your body and hook onto receptor sites of cells and neurons. Your brain takes in the information, converts it into chemicals, and lets your whole body know if there's trouble in the world or cause for celebration. Your body is directly influenced as these molecules course through the bloodstream, delivering the energetic effect of whatever your brain is thinking and feeling. — Deepak Chopra

Regrets are like molecules. We're all made up of a lot of them. They are elemental. Building blocks. The foundations of memory. You can dawdle in the past, allow it to shadow you, or you can walk forward into the light of tomorrow.But you can't altogether disregard what has already been- byways chosen, detours taken. The misbegotten decisions you can never reverse, but only by sorting through them can you find where you took the wrong turns and gain proper perspective. Time is a parabolic lens, bringing hindsight into focus. — Ellen Hopkins

When acquaintances embrace, one can read the gap between them. When friends, when siblings embrace, no matter how close, there is still an infinitesimal distance, like a layer of molecules, separating them. When a mother hugs her child, they meet. But when lovers embrace, they don't just meet but join. Tess — Kate Elliott

And what is literature, Rabo," he said, "but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought'. — Kurt Vonnegut

This is solute, which will cause every animal killed by Halo action to instantly decay into component molecules. This will avert an ecological miasma. But it could also be construed as a way to hide a tremendous crime from later investigators. — Greg Bear

I finally drift back to sleep. I'm in the darkness. The molecules of my mind are still scattered, and I float through oily black space, trying to swipe them up like fireflies. Every time I go to sleep, I know I may never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping that when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn't been gnawed to bones by nameless beasts below. Hoping you pull up anything at all. — Isaac Marion

To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe. — Jerry Garcia

The structural or biogenetic relations of plant products as deduced from the recognizable architectural components of the molecules have been consistent guides in my investigations. — Robert Robinson

(7) Evolution contradicts the scientific law that no effect can be greater than its cause, since it assumes that intelligence was developed from non-intelligent matter, that morality was evolved from nonmoral processes, that love and other emotional qualities came out of unfeeling chemicals, that infinitely complex structures arose from simple beginnings, and that spiritual consciousness began out of inert molecules. — Henry Morris

I take a step toward him. My arm reaches up. I don't know if I'm reaching for the pipe or for him. I want to touch his skin. I want to breathe in what he breathes. The yellow swirl. I want to be the yellow swirl. I want him to breathe me in, be sent riding on oxygen molecules deep into his lungs. I want to travel through his body, seeing what makes him happy. Attaching myself to whatever place in him sparks to life on my arrival. His blood, his tissues, his muscles, I want to burrow inside the folds like a windblown dusting of snow, so that each time I melt away he seeks me out again. — Josh Kilmer-Purcell

An immune system of enormous complexity is present in all vertebrate animals. When we place a population of lymphocytes from such an animal in appropriate tissue culture fluid, and when we add an antigen, the lymphocytes will produce specific antibody molecules, in the absense of any nerve cells. I find it astonishing that the immune system embodies a degree of complexity which suggests some more or less superficial though striking analogies with human language, and that this cognitive system has evolved and functions without assistance of the brain. — Niels Kaj Jerne

Still I had a lurking question. Would it not be better if one could really 'see' whether molecules as complicated as the sterols, or strychnine were just as experiment suggested? — Dorothy Hodgkin

Perhaps the most impressive illustration of all is to suppose that you could label the molecules in a tumbler of water ... threw it anywhere you please on the earth, and went away from the earth for a few million years while all the water on the earth, the oceans, rivers, lakes and clouds had had time to mix up perfectly. Now supposing that perfect mixing had taken place, you come back to earth and draw a similar tumbler of water from the nearest tap, how many of those marked molecules would you expect to find in it? Well, the answer is 2000. There are 2000 times more molecules in a tumbler of water than there are tumblers of water in the whole earth. — Francis William Aston

We are trying to find drugs, small molecules, that people could take to make them disease-resistant, more youthful and healthy. Eventually we will find them. — Cynthia Kenyon

It was a strange lightness, a drifting feeling. Zero gravity. I understood that everything that once seemed solid and immovable might just float away. And that this was a truth of life, not an illusion in the grieving mind of a child. Everything that is hard and heavy in your world is made up of billions of molecules in constant motion offering the illusion of permanence. But it all tends toward breaking down and falling away. Some things just go more quickly, more surprisingly, than others. — Lisa Unger

Nature loves efficiency, which is very odd for something supposedly working at random. When you drop a ball, it falls straight down without taking any unexpected detours. When two molecules with the potential for bonding meet, they always bond- there is no room for indecision. This expenditure of least energy, also called the law of least effort, covers human beings, too. Certainly our bodies cannot escape the efficiency of the chemical processes goings on in each cell, so it is probable that our whole being is wrapped up in the same principle. This argument also applies to personal growth- the idea that everyone is doing the best he or she can from his or her own level of consciousness — Deepak Chopra

Fat Charlie was thirsty and his head hurt and his mouth tasted evil and his eyes were too tight in his head and all his teeth twinged and his stomach burned and his back was aching in a way that started around his knees and went up to his forehead and his brains had been removed and replaced with cotton balls and needles and pins which was why it hurt to try and think, and his eyes were not just too tight in his head but they must have rolled out in the night and been reattached with roofing nails; and now he noticed that anything louder than the gentle Brownian motion of air molecules drifting softly past each other was above his pain threshold. Also, he wished he were dead. — Neil Gaiman

As soon as we touch the complex processes that go on in a living thing, be it plant or animal, we are at once forced to use the methods of this science [chemistry]. No longer will the microscope, the kymograph, the scalpel avail for the complete solution of the problem. For the further analysis of these phenomena which are in flux and flow, the investigator must associate himself with those who have labored in fields where molecules and atoms, rather than multicellular tissues or even unicellular organisms, are the units of study. — John Jacob Abel

Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He's not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued. — David Eagleman

In the heavens we discover [stars] by their light, and by their light alone ... the sole evidence of the existence of these distant worlds ... that each of them is built up of molecules of the same kinds we find on earth. A molecule of hydrogen, for example, whether in Sirius or in Arcturus, executes its vibrations in precisely the same time. Each molecule therefore throughout the universe bears impressed upon it the stamp of a metric system as distinctly as does the metre of the Archives at Paris, or the royal cubit of the Temple of Karnac. — James Clerk Maxwell

The elusive truth is that there is nothing stress-producing in the physical world. Things simply are. Molecules move. Light and sound appear. — Andrew J. Bernstein

In an average person, ATP is produced at a rate of 9 x 1020 molecules per second, which equates to a turnover rate (the rate at which it is produced and consumed) of about 65 kg every day. — Nick Lane