Physiology Quotes

“All men are born firstly with the instinct to protect themselves. But few grow to really love themselves, and even fewer learn to love their neighbor as themselves.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“The Tarahumara would party like this all night, then rouse themselves the next morning to face off in a running race that could last not two miles, not two hours, but two full days. According to the Mexican historian Francisco Almada, a Tarahumara champion once ran 435 miles, the equivalent of setting out for a jog in New York City and not stopping till you were closing in on Detroit.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“In a world of seven billion people, where every inch of land has been mapped, much of it developed, and too much of it destroyed, the sea remains the final unseen, untouched, and undiscovered wilderness, the planet’s last great frontier. There are no mobile phones down there, no e-mails, no tweeting, no twerking, no car keys to lose, no terrorist threats, no birthdays to forget, no penalties for late credit card payments, and no dog shit to step in before a job interview. All the stress, noise, and distractions of life are left at the surface. The ocean is the last truly quiet place on Earth.”
― James Nestor, Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves

“Every day, hundreds of observations and experiments pour into the hopper of the scientific literature. Many of them don't have much to do with evolution - they're observations about the details of physiology, biochemistry, development, and so on - but many of them do. And every fact that has something to do with evolution confirms its truth. Every fossil that we find, every DNA molecule that we sequence, every organ system that we dissect, supports the idea that species evolved from common ancestors. Despite innumerable possible observations that could prove evolution untrue, we don't have a single one. We don't find mammals in Precambrian rocks, humans in the same layers as dinosaurs, or any other fossils out of evolutionary order. DNA sequencing supports the evolutionary relationships of species originally deduced from the fossil record. And, as natural selection predicts, we find no species with adaptations that only benefit a different species. We do find dead genes and vestigial organs, incomprehensible under the idea of special creation. Despite a million chances to be wrong, evolution always comes up right. That is as close as we can get to a scientific truth.”
― Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True

“The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them, the sun of their microcosm, that upon which all growth depends, from which all power proceeds.”
― William Harvey, An anatomical disquisition on the motion of the heart and blood in animals

“Freedom on the inside comes when validation from the outside doesn’t matter.”
― Richie Norton

“Anatomy is to physiology as geography is to history; it describes the theatre of events.”
― Jean Fernel

“Ahistorical commentators who too readily dismiss Nietzsche's interest in physiological questions (e.g., DeMan 1979: 119; Nehamas 1985: 120) miss the centrality of such ways of thinking to Nietzsche's naturalism and to the whole intellectual climate of the period. 'The naturalization of the image of man under the influence of natural science was the work of the materialist movement of the middle of the century' (Schnädelbach 1983: 229). In this regard, Nietzsche was very much a thinker of his times.”
― Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality

“A cube or sphere has the characteristics of its form or shape, that is why one calls it a sphere or cube. Just as a cat is what we call a cat by its body type and physiology and its form delineates its interaction with its environment.”
― Leviak B. Kelly, Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction

“All the repressed emotions and subconscious desires in time lead to some kind of psychological or physiological breakdown, if kept unchecked.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“Energy drinks like Red Bull may give you wings for the moment, but in time it takes away your basic physical and mental wellness and leads to disastrous psychiatric and physiological conditions.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost

“A good physiological experiment like a good physical one requires that it should present anywhere, at any time, under identical conditions, the same certain and unequivocal phenomena that can always be confirmed.”
― Johannes Peter Müller

“A true anecdote which illustrates his unworldly nature is of the instruction he received in 1922 to appear at Buckingham Palace to receive the accolade of the Order of Knighthood; Bayliss replied that as the date coincided with that of a meeting of the Physiological Society, he would be unable to attend.”
― Charles Lovatt Evans, Reminiscences of Bayliss and Starling

“...Why is it, that from the moment you enter medical school to the moment you retire, that the only disorder you will ever diagnosis with a physics book - is obesity? This is biology folks, it's endocrinology, it's physiology - physics has nothing to do with it. The law of thermodynamics is always true, [but] the energy balance equation is irrelevant...”
― Gary Taubes

“One of my friends compared me to Bruce Banner, due to my work with radiation and human health. So I looked up Bruce Banner and this is what I found: Banner, a physicist, is sarcastic and seemingly very self-assured when he first appears in Incredible Hulk #1, but is also emotionally withdrawn in most fashions...Banner is considered one of the greatest scientific minds on Earth, possessing "a mind so brilliant it cannot be measured on any known intelligence test." He holds expertise in biology, chemistry, engineering, physiology, and nuclear physics.”
― Steven Magee

“Dwarves are sequential hermaphroditic parthenogens," Ruby said, anticipating his question.

"What?"

"They can change back and forth from male to female and are capable of fertilizing themselves to make more dwarves. They exhibit what we regard as male characteristics, typically, but some favor a more feminine approach."

Durham sat with his mouth hanging open. Ruby poked him in the tongue with her quill feather making him gag and sputter.

"So, Ginny is, what, short for Regina? Virginia?"

"I rather think it's long to 'Gin'," Ruby answered. "She's head of hazard team and Thud's second."

"So, the changing sex thing. How does that work? Does it take a while or is it the sort of thing that might happen in the middle of a conversation?"

"Hard to say," Ruby said. "Does she need to clear her throat or did she just become a male? Is he just pausing for thought or did he just impregnate himself mid-sentence?" She shrugged. "Dwarf physiology isn't really my field."

"Is there an easy way to tell?"

"Which sex a dwarf is at the moment? Not that I'm aware of but I haven't managed to think of a situation where it would matter, either, so I've not dwelt on it much.”
― Jeffery Russell, The Dungeoneers

“Nous nous tûmes l'un et l'autre ; pendant que nous attendions, je l'examinai. Un homme petit et râblé, brun comme un grain de café, ayant peut-être une tendance à engraisser, mais pour le moment excessivement mince. Les rides profondes de son visage et de son cou n'étaient pas seulement dues aux années et aux intempéries : elles indiquaient à ne pas s'y tromper les endroits où la chair ou la graisse avait fondu et où la peau s'était détendue. Le cou était simplement une surface où s'entrecroisaient les sillons et les rides et portait les traces laissées par le soleil brûlant du désert. L'Extrême-Orient, les Tropiques, le désert, chaque région laissait sa marque colorée. Mais toutes les trois étaient différentes ; et un œil qui avait su une fois pouvait ainsi les distinguer aisément. La pâleur bistrée pour le premier ; le brun rouge et violent pour la seconde ; et pour le troisième, le hâle sombre et profond qui avait pris, semblait-il, le caractère d'une coloration permanente. Mr. Corbeck avait une grosse tête pleine et massive ; avec des cheveux en désordre, d'un brun-rouge foncé, dégarnis sur les tempes. Son front était beau, haut et large ; et pour employer les termes de la physiognomonie, le sinus frontal était hardiment marqué. Sa forme carrée traduisait l'esprit raisonneur ; et la plénitude sous les yeux le don des langues. Il avait le nez court et large qui dénote l'énergie ; le menton carré - qu'on discernait malgré la barbe épaisse et non soignée - et la mâchoire massive qui montrent l'esprit de décision.
« Un homme pas mal pour le désert ! » me disais-je en le regardant.”
― Bram Stoker, Oeuvres

“Being loved is not a biological need.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The amazing flexibility of our minds seems nearly irreconcilable with the notion that our brains must be made out of fixed-rule hardware, which cannot be reprogrammed. We cannot make our neurons fire faster or slower, we cannot rewire our brains, we cannot redesign the interior of a neuron, we cannot make [any] choices about the hardware—and yet, we can control how we think.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“In bodies, a movement anywhere will send out a wave of response through the structure: the whole body participates, and the better organized it is around the skeletal core, the more clearly it reverberates. A person whose musculature is either slack or bound by excessive tension cannot act either as delicately or as powerfully as one that reverberates more freely.”
― Alexandra Pierce, Expressive Movement: Posture And Action In Daily Life, Sports, And The Performing Arts

“All human movement is expressive.”
― Alexandra Pierce

“The impulse to be looking constantly with central vision is part of a psychophysical syndrome which includes spinal fixation as another characteristic. Tunnel vision -- the use of the macula, or central portion of the retina, to the relative exclusion of the surrounding area -- is hard on/eyes and diminishes their visual potential; it accentuates selective fixation upon objects one after another, missing the whole view and seeing objects as separate from their larger context. It accompanies and fortifies a tunneling habit of mind, a tendency to, fasten onto particular issues or circumstances, to hold doggedly and sometimes with exaggerated emotionality to a point of view, and to be unable to contextualize or to find fresh responses.”
― Alexandra Pierce, Expressive Movement: Posture And Action In Daily Life, Sports, And The Performing Arts

“Physiology and Psychology are not at all separate from each other. Rather they are deeply intertwined.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosutra: The Abhijit Naskar Collection

“Skepticism is fine, but don't pass by a once in a lifetime opportunity to uncover a treasure because of it.”
― T.R. Bosse, The Mystery of the Trinity Revealed

“If you keep running after possessions – after the so-called pleasures of life, you'll end up as a psychological as well as physiological wreck.”
― Abhijit Naskar, All For Acceptance

“Reason is the olive branch of humanity.”
― Anon Cuk

“Tthe words we choose create the life we live. When you say that sad, angry, disappointed or frustrated are “fine”, eventually your physiology will be tricked into believing it’s true.”
― Tamara Lechner, The Happiness Reset - What To Do When Nothing Makes You Happy

“Mandalas are based on the idea that anything which is done consecutively for forty days makes an imprint on the body as a habit. Our bodies’ physiology changes every forty to forty-eight days and so we are given raw material to work with.”
― Donna Goddard, Prana

“Our bodies being as magical as they are, the tissue wraps up the bullet and protects the body from it. I once had a student who fainted during a session. Turns out he'd been shot ten years ago and the bullet they'd left in his elbow had mushroomed into a lead-leaking bomb." She poked a finger into Yash's elbow and made an explosion with her hand. "Boom! It was flooding lead into his blood like a pump."
Yash's eyes shone. "Wow!" The smile he threw India lit a spark inside her. "What happened?"
Tara grinned, relishing the gore as much as her captivated audience. "They dug the bullet out of him. It was five times its original size. Then they pumped him full of drugs to absorb the lead. No permanent damage. Simen ended up going to nursing school.”
― Sonali Dev, Incense and Sensibility

“The 2019 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded for discovering how ‘Hypoxia Inducible Factor’ senses and adapts cellular response to oxygen availability.”
― Steven Magee, Toxic Altitude