Physiological Quotes

1. "When a person eats shortly before going to bed, digestion accompanies sleep. The two great physiological functions are completed together, leaving the maximum of freedom to the mind during the day."
Author: Adalbert De Vogüé

2. "For over two billion years, through the apparent fancy of her endless differentiations and metamorphosis the Cell, as regards its basic physiological mechanisms, has remained one and the same. It is life itself, and our true and distant ancestor."
Author: Albert Claude

3. "But if we reason it out simply and not try to be one bit fancy, then what sort of pride can you possibly take or what's the sense of ever having it, if man is poorly put together as a physiological type and if the enormous majority of the human race is brutal, stupid, and profoundly unhappy?"
Author: Anton Chekhov

4. "Some religions actually go so far as to label anyone who belongs to a religious sect other than their own a heretic, even though the overall doctrines and impressions of godliness are nearly the same. For example: The Catholics believe the Protestants are doomed to Hell simply because they do not belong to the Catholic Church. In the same way, many splinter groups of the Christian faith, such as the evangelical or revivalist churches, believe the Catholics worship graven images. (Christ is depicted in the image that is most physiologically akin to the individual worshipping him, and yet the Christians criticize "heathens" for the worship of graven images.) And the Jews have always been given the Devil's name."
Author: Anton Szandor LaVey

5. "As a successful young man, I have developed myself to a level where physiological needs, safety and security needs, social needs and ego needs are no more challenge to me. I do not think about how to sleep with a girl on the street. I do not think about how to make the guy next door my friend. I do not think about how to be happy with my achievements. I know how to! The only thing I make a go at and keep on going strong for is actualizing myself; life fulfilling itself in me; Becoming who I want to be so that I can do someone a world of good as I really want to."
Author: Anyaele Sam Chiyson

6. "It is eminently reasonable that men should seek to associate with those who share their convictions and values. It is impossible to deal or even to communicate with men whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to one's own (and one should be free not to deal with them). All proper associations are formed or joined by individual choice and on conscious, intellectual grounds (philosophical, political, professional, etc.)—not by the physiological or geographical accident of birth, and not on the ground of tradition. When men are united by ideas, i.e., by explicit principles, there is no room for favors, whims, or arbitrary power: the principles serve as an objective criterion for determining actions and for judging men, whether leaders or members."
Author: Ayn Rand

7. "Michael Pollan: "The industrialization--and dehumanization--of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do."U.S. consumers may take our pick of reasons to be wary of the resulting product: growth hormones, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, unhealthy cholesterol composition, deadly E. coli strains, fuel consumption, concentration of manure into toxic waste lagoons, and the turpitude of keeping confined creatures at the limits of their physiological and psychological endurance."
Author: Barbara Kingsolver

8. "Feelings aroused by the touch of someone's hand, the sound of music, the smell of a flower, a beautiful sunset, a work of art, love, laughter, hope and faith - all work on both the unconscious and the conscious aspects of the self, and they have physiological consequences as well."
Author: Bernie Siegel

9. "CALVIN:Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor?When you think about it, it's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it's funny.Don't you think it's odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?HOBBES:I suppose if we couldn't laugh at the things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life."
Author: Bill Watterson

10. "Success and failure are emotional and physiological experiences. We need to deal with them in a way that is present and calm."
Author: Chade Meng Tan

11. "Whales have been evolving for thirty million years. To our one million. A sperm whale's brain is seven times the size of mine… The great size of his body has little to do with the great size of his brain, other than as a place to keep it. I have What If fantasies… What if the catalyst or the key to understanding creation lay somewhere in the immense mind of the whale? … Some species go for months without eating anything. Just completely idle.. So they have this incredible mental apparatus and no one has the least notion what they do with it. Lilly says that the most logical supposition, based on physiological and ecological evidence, is that they contemplate the universe… Suppose God came back from wherever it is he's been and asked us smilingly if we'd figure it out yet. Suppose he wanted to know if it had finally occurred to us to ask the whale. And then he sort of looked around and he said, "By the way, where are the whales?"
Author: Cormac McCarthy

12. "That we are rational agents—that a great many of our actions are not merely the results of serial physiological urges but are instead dictated by coherent conceptual connections and private deliberations—is one of those primordial data I mentioned above that cannot be reduced to some set of purely mechanical functions without producing nonsense. That a number of cognitive scientists should be exerting themselves to tear down the Cartesian partition between body and soul, hoping to demonstrate that there is no Wonderful Wizard on the other side pulling the levers, is poignant proof that our mechanistic paradigms trap much of our thinking about mind and body within an absurd dilemma: we must believe either in a ghost mysteriously animating a machine or in a machine miraculously generating a ghost. Premodern thought allowed for a far less restricted range of conceptual possibilities."
Author: David Bentley Hart

13. "It is easy sometimes to blame genetics, some obesity gene perhaps. But even if this were true, we'll still be referring to the machine. Genetics are predispositions. The body is designed as a closed system, physiologically speaking and unless acted upon by an outside or higher force it maintains its functions. It is designed to sustain its own survival. The psychological (self-ordinate command) is essential for this survival because the body also belongs to a self, one that can overfeed it, starve it or kill it as may be. It is also by material urges that you seek to acquire wealth and by self command, suppose what you consider a higher more fulfilling purpose that you choose to give it all away.The hard core truth is that despite some obesity gene, you can starve yourself to death if you want, or perhaps if you feel you have an ulterior higher purpose like an anorexic might, to look thin and beautiful in the eyes of the communal."
Author: Dew Platt

14. "I don't know if it is a spiritual, physiological or psychological phenomenon, but I believe now more than ever that singing is a universal, built-in mechanism designed to cultivate empathy and compassion."
Author: Eric Whitacre

15. "Most of them are doomed to rapid extinction, but a few may make evolutionary inventions, such as physiological, ecological, or behavioral innovations that give these species improved competitive potential."
Author: Ernst Mayr

16. "For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

17. "If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy."
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche

18. "And while these pounds were being shed, while the physiological miracles were occurring with the heart and muscle and metabolism, psychological marvels were taking place as well. Just so, the world over, bodies, minds, and souls are constantly being born again, during miles on the road."
Author: George Sheehan

19. "For her, sex was nothing more than an itch. And this phsychological and physiological neutrality of hers at once relieved her of so many human emotions and sentiments and desires. Sexual neutrality was the essence of coldness in an individual. It was a great and wonderful thing to be born with."
Author: Ian Fleming

20. "Each race (or variety) is characterized by a more or less distinct combination of inherited morphological, behavioral, physiological traits."
Author: J. Philippe Rushton

21. "You have not slept for many days together, Legna. Why do you assume you might have success today?"Legna turned around sharply, driving her gaze and attention out the window, trying to use the sprawling lawn as a slate with which to fill her mind. Mind Demon he was not, but she knew he was capable of seeing far enough into her emotional state by just monitoring her physiological reactions to his observations. Legna bit her lip hard, furious that she should feel like the child he always referred to her as in their conversations. Young one, indeed. How would he like it if she referred to him as a decrepit old buzzard?"
Author: Jacquelyn Frank

22. "I heard Professor Cannon lecture last night, going partly on your account. His subject was a physiological substitute for war—which is international sports and I suppose motorcycle races—to encourage the secretion of the adrenal glands!"
Author: James McKeen Cattell

23. "All I ever promised was that I was sure I could develop a new pharmacological agent which might answer a physiological question. Any utility would be implicit in that answer."
Author: James W. Black

24. "She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread - the bedside clock ticking, the blue moonlight coating the window like glue - before she`d remember the brutal fact that had caused it."
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

25. "Color is powerful. It is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you're wearing bright red pants."
Author: Jessi Arrington

26. "It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying onceself Cathy in "Wuthering Heights" with one's head in a Food Fair bag."
Author: Joan Didion

27. "Prepare a little hot tea or broth and it should be brought to them . . . without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it ' ... There was something arresting about the matter-of-fact wisdom here, the instinctive understanding of the physiological disruptions... I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat."
Author: Joan Didion

28. "Art alone makes life possible – this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art man is inconceivable in physiological terms… I would say man does not consist only of chemical processes, but also of metaphysical occurrences. The provocateur of the chemical processes is located outside the world. Man is only truly alive when he realizes he is a creative, artistic being… Even the act of peeling a potato can be a work of art if it is a conscious act."
Author: Joseph Beuys

29. "Cinema has the capacity to be so physiological."
Author: Kathryn Bigelow

30. "Headache, hmm?" His expression went serious. "Do you know what's the best cure for that?""What?""Orgasm."He said it so matter-of-factly I had to sputter a laugh."Multiple, if possible," he continued. "It's a proven medical fact that one physiologic event, like orgasm, can cancel out the effects of another physiological process, such as a headache."His expression was perfectly serious, but I said, "You're full of shit.""Perhaps. If so, you should call my bluff. Just open the door and we'll test it out."
Author: Kelley Armstrong

31. "If you look at body fat, it seems to increase with age, even though your weight does not. That's a physiological fact of aging, they say. Heck it is. It is an adaptive effect of aging."
Author: Kenneth H. Cooper

32. "How old are you?""Physiologically, I'm twenty-five. Chronologically, I'm…not."
Author: Kresley Cole

33. "Is there a line to be drawn between psychological and physiological phenomena in man? and if so, where?"
Author: Leo Tolstoy

34. "Curiosity, that is, the separate drive to explore the world disinterestedly, without being stimulated by danger or physiological dissatisfaction, is, according to students of evolution, rooted in specific morphological characteristics of our species and thus cannot be eliminated from our minds as long as our species retains its identity. As both Pandora's most deplorable accident and the adventures of our progenitors in Paradise testify, curiosity has been a main cause of all the calamities and misfortunes that have befallen mankind, and it has unquestionably been the source of all its achievements."
Author: Leszek Kołakowski

35. "Politics is something similar to the lower physiological functions, with the unpleasant difference that political functions are unavoidably carried out in public."
Author: Maxim Gorky

36. "One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing intoa habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession.Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic,physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating."
Author: Niyi Osundare

37. "Did I need medication? Or did I need someone to talk to? Someone, that is, who would do more than charge the going rate for nodding and whip out a prescription pad before the first fifty minutes were up. Was I physiologically depressed? At an innate biochemical disadvantage? Or was reaching for the pad just the way things were done because the doc had been well patronized by the drug reps and had plenty of samples in her file cabinet?"
Author: Norah Vincent

38. "We know that communication must be hampered, and its form largely determined, by the unconscious but inevitable influence of a transmitting mechanism, whether that be of a merely mechanical or of a physiological character."
Author: Oliver Joseph Lodge

39. "We "activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies," Sapolsky writes, "but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions."
Author: Paul Tough

40. "The celebrated Parisian doctor Professor Xavier Bichat developed a fully materialist theory of the human body and mind in his lectures Physiological Researches on Life and Death, translated into English in 1816. Bichat defined life bleakly as ‘the sum of the functions by which death is resisted"
Author: Richard Holmes

41. "The rate of technological and human physiological change in the 20th century has been remarkable. Beyond that, a synergy between the improved technology and physiology is more than the simple addition of the two."
Author: Robert Fogel

42. "The drum, at any rate, from its martial voice and notable physiological effect, nay, even from its cumbrous and comical shape, stands alone among the instruments of noise."
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

43. "A man going quietly about his business all day long expends far more muscular energy than an athlete who lifts a huge weight once a day. This has been proved physiologically, and so the social sum total of everybody's little everyday efforts, especially when added together, doubtless releases far more energy into the world than do rare heroic feats. This total even makes the single heroic feat look positively minuscule, like a grain of sand on a mountaintop with a megalomaniacal sense of its own importance."
Author: Robert Musil

44. "LSD was not a pharmacological agent generating exotic experiences by its interaction with the neurophysiological processes in the brain. This remarkable substance was clearly an unspecific catalyst of the deep dynamics of the human psyche. The experiences induced by it were not neurochemical artifacts, symptoms of a toxic psychosis as mainstream psychiatrists called it, but genuine manifestations of the human psyche itself."
Author: Stanislav Grof

45. "Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which wellnigh produced a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic sneeze."
Author: Thomas Hardy

46. "Karhiders discuss sexual matters freely, and talk about kemmer with both reverence and gusto, but they are reticent about discussing perversion - at least they were with me. Excessive prolongation of the kemmer period, with permanent hormonal imbalance toward the male or the female, causes what they call perversion; it is not rare; three or four percent of adults may be physiological perverts or abnormals - normals, by our standard. They are not excluded from society, but they are tolerated with some disdain, as homosexuals are in many bisexual societies, the Karhidish slang for them is halfdeads. They are sterile."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

47. "The attitude of physiological psychology to sensations and feelings, considered as psychical elements, is, naturally, the attitude of psychology at large."
Author: Wilhelm Wundt

48. "Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mention for his useful work in asking for the proof that "acquired characters" or, to speak more precisely, parental experience can really be transmitted to the offspring. The ocurrence of progressive adaptation by transmission of effects of use had seemed so natural to Darwin and his contemporaries that no proof of the physiological reality of the henomenon was thought necessary. Weismann's challenge revealed the utter inadequacy of the evidence on which the beliefs were based. They are doubtless isolated observations which may be interpreted as favouring the belief in these transmissions, but such meagre indications as exist are by general consent admitted to be too slight to be of much assistance in the attempt to understand how the more complex adaptive mechanisms arose."
Author: William Bateson

49. "As long as museums and universities send out expeditions to bring to light new forms of living and extinct animals and new data illustrating the interrelations of organisms and their environments, as long as anatomists desire a broad comparative basis human for anatomy, as long as even a few students feel a strong curiosity to learn about the course of evolution and relationships of animals, the old problems of taxonomy, phylogeny and evolution will gradually reassert themselves even in competition with brilliant and highly fruitful laboratory studies in cytology, genetics and physiological chemistry."
Author: William King Gregory

50. "…the samurai ethic is a political science of the heart, designed to control such discouragement and fatigue in order to avoid showing them to others. It was thought more important to look healthy than to be healthy, and more important to seem bold and daring than to be so. This view of morality, since it is physiologically based on the special vanity peculiar to men, is perhaps the supreme male view of morality."
Author: Yukio Mishima

Physiological Quotes Pictures