Organic Quotes - page 4
There is nothing whatever in Existence but immediate and living Thought:-Thought, I say, but by no means a thinking substance, a dead body in which thought inheres,-with which no-thought indeed a no-thinker is full surely at hand:-Thought, I say, and also the real Life of this Thought, which at bot tom is the Divine Life; both of which-Thought and, this its real Life-are molten together into one inward organic Unity; like as, outwardly, they are one simple, identical, eternal, and unchangeable Unity.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.
Charles Darwin
There is one living spirit prevalent over this world, (subject to certain contingencies of organic matter & chiefly heat), which assumes a multitude of forms each having acting principle according to subordinate laws. - There is one thinking sensible principle, intimately allied to one kind of organic matter-have & which thinking principle seems to be given a assumed according to a more extended relations of the individuals, whereby choice with memory or reason? is necessary-which is modified into endless forms bearing a close relation in degree & kind to the endless forms of the living beings.
Charles Darwin
Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system - with all these exalted powers - Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
Charles Darwin
I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. Nevertheless all living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction. We see this even in so trifling a circumstance as that the same poison often similarly affects plants and animals; or that the poison secreted by the gall-fly produces monstrous growths on the wild rose or oak-tree. Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed by the Creator.
Charles Darwin
The potato seems like a Romantic (organic) object.... you can watch it growing if you don't eat it. It is going to change – grow, rot, disappear. A pebble is like a Classical thing – it changes little if any... If it was big you could keep the dead down with it.... The Classical idea is not around much anymore. [Der Koning is comparing the Potatoes of Vincent Van Gogh to the Pebbles of Jean Arp.
Willem de Kooning
The prophets were not religious individualists. ...they always dealt with Israel and Judah as organic totalities. They conceived of their people as a gigantic personality which sinned as one and ought to repent as one. ...it was only when the national life of Israel was crushed by foreign invaders that the prophets began to address themselves to the individual life and lost the large horizon of public life.
Walter Rauschenbusch
We have been born into a certain Culture, at a certain phase of its organic development, we have certain gifts. These condition the earthly task which we must perform. The metaphysical task is beyond any conditioning, for it would have been the same in any age anywhere. The earthly task is merely the form of the higher task, its organic vehicle.
Francis Parker Yockey
No, I think Abstract art is valuable. It teaches people the language of painting. In my own work I have produced carvings which perhaps might see to most people purely abstract. This means that in those works I have been mainly concerned to try to solve problems of design and composition. But these carvings have not really satisfied me because I have not had the same sort of grip or hold over them that I have as soon as a thing takes on a kind of organic idea. And in almost all my carvings there has been an organic idea in my mind. I think of it as having a head, body, limbs..
Henry Moore
Since the Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds – all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this overgrowth, and make us once more shape-conscious. To do this he has had to concentrate on very simple direct shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious.. ..it may now be no longer necessary to close down and restrict sculpture to the single form unit. We can now begin to open out. To relate and combine together several forms of varied sizes, sections, and directions into one organic whole.
Henry Moore
For me, Still's pictorial dramas are an extension of the Greek Persephone myth. As he himself has expressed it, his paintings are 'of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated'. Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things. To me they form a theogony of the most elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself beyond the will to live – a profound and moving experience. [in the catalogue introduction for the first one-man-show of Clyfford Still].
Mark Rothko
