Symbiotic Relationships Quotes

Synergy is everywhere in nature. If you plant two plants close together, the roots commingle and improve the quality of the soil so that both plants will grow better than if they were separated. If you put two pieces of wood together, they will hold much more than the total weight held by each separately. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One plus one equals three or more.

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.

An argument often given for why Earth couldn't host another form of life is that once the life we know became established, it would have eliminated any competition through natural selection. But if another form of life were confined to its own niche, there would be little direct competition with regular life.

Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.

We are born for cooperation, as are the feet, the hands, the eyelids, and the upper and lower jaws.

We need each other to do things that we can't do for ourselves. If we are intimately connected with each other, we just give things to each other; if we don't know each other we find another way to handle it. If you think about it, each according to his or her abilities and each according to his or her needs is sort of the same thing as supply and demand.

Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.

No enterprise can exist for itself alone.

The evolutionary struggle for survival is really a self-serving series of blows and stabs, and yet it can lead to extremely social animals like dolphins, wolves or, for that matter, primates.

The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.

It would be hard to conceive a system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents should represent or support one another better. The husband has an interest in protecting the wife, she in serving the husband. The weaker gains in authority and safety, the wilder and more unconcerned finds a help-mate at home to take thought of his daily necessities. Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. Mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle.

Widely dispersed knowledge concerning the important role of basic cooperative processes among living beings may lead to the acceptance of cooperation as a guiding principle both in social theory and as a basis for human behavior. Such a development when it occurs will alter the course of human history.

Our new economic approach is rooted in ideas which stress the importance of macro-economics, post neo-classical endogenous growth theory and the symbiotic relationships between growth and investment, and people and infrastructure.

Barack Obama and Jimmy Hoffa are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Lady Gaga and hype, the 'Jersey Shore' cast and hairspray: inseparable. The president can no more disown the Teamsters Union's leader than he can disown his own id.

A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you can see. Roots to leaves, yes-those you can, in part, see. But it is more-it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one.

...no matter how complex or affluent, human societies are nothing but subsystems of the biosphere, the Earth's thin veneer of life, which is ultimately run by bacteria, fungi and green plants.

Communion is the law of growth, and homes only thrive when they sustain relations with each other.

All life is part of a complex relationship in which each is dependent upon the others, taking from, giving to and living with all the rest.

Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.

More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands..... Relations are what matter most.

There is a deep interconnectedness of all life on earth, from the tiniest organisms, to the largest ecosystems, and absolutely between each person.

There is no differentiation between all living things: trees, river, animals, and humans. We are all one interdependent organism, so our focus may seem broad but each element interacts with the other. We have so many phenomenal eyes, skills, and hands on deck. It's mind-blowingly exciting.

It's incorrect to think of bacteria as these asocial, single cells. They are individual cells, but they act in communities, exactly the way people do.