Homeostasis Quotes

[A living organism] ... feeds upon negative entropy ... Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.

Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.

The constancy of the blood sugar level is maintained by a complex physiological mechanism, a homeostatic mechanism of the same order as those which maintain the body temperature, the blood pressure or the heart rate at normal levels and control many other functions.

The third stage was the reaction that came when the body struggled to compensate for its ills - when, for instance, the white count not only returned to normal but increased to much higher than normal levels.

Hormones get no respect. We think of them as the elusive chemicals that make us a bit moody, but these magical little molecules do so much more.

Man, like other organisms, is so perfectly coordinated that he may easily forget, whether awake or asleep, that he is a colony of cells in action, and that it is the cells which achieve, through him, what he has the illusion of accomplishing himself.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

We are unconscious of most of our body's processes, thank goodness, because we'd screw it up if we weren't. The human body is so complex, with so many parts...a system which is far more complex than we can fully imagine. The idea that we are consciously care-taking such a large and mysterious system is ludicrous.

If the blood humor is too strong and robust, calm it with balance and harmony.

Physiology is concerned with all those phenomena of life that present them selves to us in sense perception as bodily processes, and accordingly form part of that total environment which we name the external world.

By 'life,' we mean a thing that can nourish itself and grow and decay.

Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.

I believe that the power which the spleen possesses of regulating its amount of blood depends entirely upon mechanical properties.

It is clear to all that the animal organism is a highly complex system consisting of an almost infinite series of parts connected both with one another and, as a total complex, with the surrounding world, with which it is in a state of equilibrium.

The number of cells in our bodies is defined by an equilibrium of opposing forces: mitosis adds cells, while programmed cell death removes them. Just as too much cell division can lead to a pathological increase in cell number, so can too little cell death.

In many organisms, including man, the mechanical respiration and the circulation of the blood are 'regulated' so as to correspond to the demand of the moment.

No matter how much it gets abused, the body can restore balance. The first rule is to stop interfering with nature.

Poor health is not caused by something you don't have; it's caused by disturbing something that you already have. Health is not something you need to get, it's something you have already if you don't disturb it.

Life clearly does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes. Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.

A human body is a conversation going on, both within the cells and between the cells, and they're telling each other to grow and to die; when you're sick, something's gone wrong with that conversation.

Why do we have a brain in the first place? Not to write books, articles, or plays; not to do science or play music. Brains develop because they are an expedient way of managing life in a body.

It is true practically if not altogether without exception that the changes studied by any science tend to equilibrate or neutralize the forces which bring them about, and finally to come to rest.

We finally understand in general terms how a cell is organized, how its specialized organs function in a well integrated manner to insure its survival and replication.

Ultimately, life is a chemical interaction.

The production and consumption of glucose, and hence, the blood sugar level, are controlled by a functional endocrine equilibrium.