Nonliving Things Quotes & Sayings

Fire, as we have learned to our cost, has an insatiable hunger to be fed. It is a nonliving force that can even locomote itself. — Loren Eiseley

From some Christians as far back as the twelfth century, certainly from farther back in so-called primitive cultures, and from some ecologists of our own time, we have the idea of a great kindness including and binding together all beings: the living and the nonliving, the plants and animals, the water, the air, the stones. All, ultimately, are of a kind, belonging together, interdependently, in this world. From the point of view of Genesis I or of the 104th Psalm, we would say that all are of one kind, one kinship, one nature, because all are creatures. — Wendell Berry

All the literati keep
An imaginary friend. — W. H. Auden

The apparent incompatibility between the abundance of habitable planets in our Galaxy and the lack of extraterrestrial visitors, known as the Fermi paradox, suggest the existence of what Hanson calls a "Great Filter," an evolutionary/technological roadblock somewhere along the developmental path from nonliving matter to space-colonizing life. If we discover independently evolved primitive life in our Solar System, this would suggest that primitive life is not rare, and that the roadblock lies after our current human stage of development-perhaps because assumption 1 is false, or because almost all advanced civilizations self-destruct before they are able to colonize. I'm therefore crossing my fingers that all searches for life on Mars and elsewhere find nothing: this is consistent with the scenario where primitive life is rare but we humans got lucky, so that we have the roadblock behind us and have extraordinary future potential. — Max Tegmark

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

In return for the service and to cover the annual cost for fund management and other expenses, the mutual fund levies fund management charges (FMC). The FMC levied varies across schemes from around 0.75% to 2.50% (the — Vinod Pottayil

Some Christians want enough of Christ to be identified with him but not enough to be seriously inconvenienced; they genuinely cling to basic Christian orthodoxy but do not want to engage in serious Bible study; they value moral probity, especially of the public sort, but do not engage in war against inner corruptions; they fret over the quality of the preacher's sermon but do not worry much over the quality of their own prayer life. Such Christians are content with mediocrity. — D. A. Carson

Nature draws no line between living and nonliving. — K. Eric Drexler

What I could tell the boy was, the moment we are born appears to be the very same moment we forget we are loved. Now isn't this awkward? Shouldn't the two things dovetail, love and memory? Shouldn't a feeling that powerful be carved on a tree so no one can ignore its message? To come so far to be in this world only to forget something all-important - what kind of a journey is that? I'll bet that 90 percent of the love that surrounds us is dismissed or discounted - the cup of tea a friend makes, the letter from a faraway auntie. The fact that no one feels loved enough merely proves my point. — Laurie Fox

The guru is not someone who is confined to the body. When there is selfless love for the guru, we will be able to see him not only in his body but in every living and nonliving thing in this world. Learn to see everything as the guru's body and to serve them accordingly. — Mata Amritanandamayi

Who is a magician? The one who says, "I bring nonliving people to life. — Bhavik Sarkhedi

The universe (he said) offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a nonliving brain - although it may think it can - the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite. — Stephen King

I could see now that a literary education did not fit one for the popular novelist's trade.Once you had started using words like flavicomous or acroamatic, because you liked the sound of them, you were lost. — Woodrow Wilson

Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity's relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we've learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is- more than anything else- a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time and various living things. It's not just about human-to-human interaction; it's not just about spiritual interaction. It's about all interaction. We're bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive. We can keep debating ideologies and sending entreaties toward heaven. But unless we embrace the fuller reality we're in- and reality's implications- we'll face big problems. — Carl Safina

Tektology was the first attempt in the history of science to arrive at a systematic formulation of the principles of organization operating in living and nonliving systems. — Fritjof Capra

Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. In ecology we speak of "wild systems." When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive. — Gary Snyder

One method of destroying a concept is by diluting its meaning. Observe that by ascribing rights to the unborn, i.e., the nonliving, the anti-abortionists obliterate the rights of the living. — Ayn Rand

The belief that life on earth arose spontaneously from nonliving matter, is simply a matter of faith in strict reductionism and is based entirely on ideology. — Hubert Yockey

The nonliving universe is as diverse and as dynamic as the living universe, and is also dominated by patterns of organization that are not yet understood. — Freeman Dyson

When people ask me about the definition of a copywriter, I say, "If I become a good copywriter, I will have the ability to bring nonliving people to life. — Bhavik Sarkhedi

What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar. — Ruth Rendell

I've never taken a woman on a beach," - Rowan Whitethorn — Sarah J. Maas

The task of asking nonliving matter to speak and the responsibility for interpreting its reply is that of physics. — Julius Thomas Fraser

Thank you for your input; I can tell you are struggling towards being interesting. — Stephen Fry

The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call "soil" is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil's living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested ... Chemicals that sterilize the soil destroy organisms that fight plant diseases, aerate, and manufacture fertility. Recent research has discovered that just adding phosphorus (the P in all "NPK" fertilizers) kills the tiny filaments of fungi that help plants absorb nutrients. — Barbara Kingsolver

If you're smart, you'll think twice, when they start to sound off with advice. — Elvis Presley

Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future nullity, than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our muscles. — George Eliot

Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'to cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word 'shit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us 'scythe' and 'scissors' and 'schism,' which have obvious connections to the concept of separation. — Neal Stephenson

Each day we wake up and make myriad choices that affect others. We clothe ourselves with shirts, pants, and shoes that may have been sewn together by women working in factories fourteen-plus hours a day for a nonliving wage; we buy products manufactured in ways the destroy forests, pollute waterways, and poison the air; we wash our hair with shampoos that may have been squeezed into the eyes of conscious rabbits or force-fed to them in quantities that kill; and on and on. As Derrick Jensen has written in his book "The Culture of Make Believe", "It is possible to destroy a culture without being aware of its existence. It is possible to commit genocide or ecocide from the comfort of one's living room — Zoe Weil

Monod proposed an analogy: Just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an "abstract kingdom" rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas. Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. Ideas have "spreading power," he noted - "infectivity, as it were" - and some more than others. An example of an infectious idea might be a religious ideology that gains sway over a large group of people. The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry had put forward a similar notion several years earlier, arguing that ideas are "just as real" as the neurons they inhabit. Ideas have power, he said. — James Gleick

Perhaps the problem is the seeming need that people have of making black-and-white cutoffs when it comes to certain mysterious phenomena, such as life and consciousness. People seem to want there to be an absolute threshold between the living and the nonliving, and between the thinking and the "merely mechanical," ... But the onward march of science seems to force us ever more clearly into accepting intermediate levels of such properties. — Douglas Hofstadter

The seams, the laminae between the various worlds the past present and future as well as the living and the nonliving may not be as distinct and clear-cut as we have been taught or as our somewhat arbitrary clocks and calendars have led us to believe. — Rick Bass

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

We are all connected. The living to the nonliving, as the nonliving to the living. All things in all directions in all times. It is only in the physical dimension that we have limitations. (The membrane between us is thinner than you think.) — Garth Stein

If you are not concerned about the outcome of a circumstance, you will experience no fear. Whatever the outcome will be, will be, whether you fear it or not. — Chin-Ning Chu