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Quote by Donna Seaman

“People who live wholly urbanized lives, spending little time outdoors and rarely stopping to notice life that is not human-made, suffer emotionally and spiritually, cut off, as they are, from our souls' well-spring. We need more than the flat world born of our synthetically directed thoughts - our walls and cubicles, television and computer screens. We need to feed out senses with sunshine and wind, night and rain, hills, trees, and flowing water. We must nurture what master tracker and nature photographer Paul Rezendes calls the 'wild within, the larger sense of who we are...the whole of the conscious universe.”

Quote by Donna Seaman

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Donna Seaman

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“Cancer, we have discovered, is stitched into our genome. Oncogenes arise from mutations in essential genes that regulate the growth of cells. Mutations accumulate in these genes when DNA is damaged by carcinogens, but also by seemingly random errors in copying genes when cells divide. The former might be preventable, but the latter is endogenous. Cancer is a flaw in our growth, but this flaw is deeply entrenched in ourselves. We can rid ourselves of cancer, then, only as much as we can rid ourselves of the processes in out physiology that depend on growth-aging, regeneration, healing, reproduction.”

LifeDeathHuman NatureEvolutionSurvivalMedicineCancerBiologyGene
Book:The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
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“We are chemical apes: having discovered the capacity to extract, purify, and react molecules to produce new and wondrous molecules, we have begun to spin a new chemical universe around ourselves. Our bodies our cells, our genes are thus being immersed and reimmersed in a changing flux of molecules -pesticides, pharmaceutical drugs, plastics, cosmetics, estrogens, food products, hormones, even novel forms of physical impulses, such as radiation and magnetism. Some of these, inevitably, will be carcinogenic. We cannot wish this world away; our task, the, is to sift through it vigilantly to discriminate bona fide carcinogens from innocent and useful bystanders.”

LifeDeathTechnologyHuman NatureEvolutionSurvivalMedicineCancerBiologyGene
Book:The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
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“When one develops one’s natural needs, desires, inclinations, and capacities in ways that harmonise and unify one’s inner psychological states and fits these into a grand natural order that facilitates successful action in the world, and when one reaches the point where one regularly and spontaneously achieves these dual aims, one feels that one is one’s element, has found one’s home, and is performing one’s proper role in the world. Such action generates a special feeling of joy or happiness not only for those who behave this way but also for those who observe such behaviour.”

PhilosophyHappinessHuman NatureOneness
Book:Oneness: East Asian Conceptions of Virtue, Happiness, and How We Are All Connected
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“There are other beliefs which, though disproved countless times, never die out, because they appeal, not to something in everyone, but to a certain perennial type of person. An example is, the belief that everyone is at bottom selfish, or that no one ever acts intentionally except from motives of self-interest. There is a perennial human type to whom this belief is peculiarly and irresistibly congenial. It is almost never a woman. It is a kind of man who is deficient in generous or even disinterested impulses himself, and knows it, but keeps up his self-esteem by thinking that everyone else is really in the same case. He prides himself, both on having the perspicacity to realise, what most people disguise even from themselves, that everyone is selfish, and on having the uncommon candour not to conceal this unpleasant home truth. Who has not met people of this type? In the Australian-English of 50 years ago, there was a wonderful expression for this kind of man: he was said to be 'as flash as a rat with a gold tooth”

Human NatureGreedSelfish
Book:Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity and Other Fables of Evolution
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“Every morning, I eat this dish called -hope-. Crumbs mostly, but without it, I'm not even human.' A long pause while her mind spun. 'But that's just it. There are no guarantees. Because if you can guarantee it, it's not hope.' [Joe] ... He [Pockets] adjusted his feet. 'I've been in some places where there is no hope, and yet somehow it swims through the cracks. Rises to the surface. I've found hope staring me in the face when reason screamed I had non. No matter what you do--ignore it, shove it in a closet, drown it with drink and pill, or stab it with science, experts, and talking heads--you can't kill hope. Not in all of human history has hope ever been laid to rest. When we breathe in, it's the stuff that expands our lungs. It's the reason we're not just dust.' She tried to laugh. 'I thought love did all that.' He sucked through his teeth. 'It's tough to tell those two apart, mum. But if you press me, love is what makes us who we are. Hope is how we express us. Hope is love with legs.”

LoveHopeHuman Nature
Book:The Last Exchange
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