What is Life?

„A scientist is supposed to have a complete and thorough knowledge, at first hand, of some subjects and, therefore, is usually expected not to write on any topic of which he is not a master.”

„There is nothing over which a free man ponders less than death; his wisdom is, to meditate not on death but on life.”

„Even if I should be right in this, I do not know whether my way of approach is really the best and simplest. But, in short, it was mine. The „naive physicist” was myself.”

„The one and only thing of paramount interest to us in ourselves is, that we feel and think and perceive.”

„Only in the co-operation of an enormously large number of atoms do statistical laws begin to operate and control the behaviour of these assemblies with an accuracy increasing as the number of atoms involved increases.”

„The mutations are actually due to quantum jumps in the gene molecule.”

„Neither can the body determine the mind to think, nor the mind determine the body to motion or rest or anything else (if such there be).”

„LIVING MATTER EVADES THE DECAY TO EQUILIBRIUM.”

„When a system that is not alive is isolated or placed in a uniform environment, all motion usually comes to a standstill very soon as a result of various kinds of friction… After that the whole system fades away into a dead, inert lump of matter. A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of „maximum entropy”.”

„A living organism continually increases its entropy — or, as you may say, produces positive entropy — and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy.”

„Entropy, taken with the negative sign, is itself a measure of order. Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.”

„If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all.”

„That all physical laws are based on statistics.”

„The only possible inference… is, I think, that I — I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt „I” — am the person, if any, who controls the „motion of the atoms” according to the Laws of Nature.”

„The mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other, have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).”

„Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular.”

„Consciousness finds itself intimately connected with, and dependent on, the physical state of a limited region of matter, the body.”

„Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.”

„A single experience that is never to repeat itself is biologically irrelevant.”

„One might say, metaphorically, that consciousness is the tutor who supervises the education of the living substance, but leaves his pupil alone to deal with all those tasks for which he is already sufficiently trained.”

„Consciousness is associated with those of its functions that adapt themselves by what we call experience to a changing environment.”

„Our conscious life is necessarily a continued fight against our primitive ego.”

„It is true that a single day of one's life, nay even any individual life as a whole, is but a minute blow of the chisel at the ever unfinished statue.”

„At every step, on every day of our life, as it were, something of the shape that we possessed until then has to change, to be overcome, to be deleted and replaced by something new. For we ourselves are chisel and statue, conquerors and conquered at the same time.”

„Consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution.”

„For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species; in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.”

„Though we are still pretty vigorous egoists, many of us begin to see that nationalism too is a vice that ought to be given up.”

„If we were bees, ants or Lacedaemonian warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist and cowardice is the most shameful thing in the world, warring would go on for ever. But luckily we are only men — and cowards.”

„There is no reason whatever for believing that our brain is the supreme ne plus ultra of an organ of thought in which the world is reflected.”

„Not every need can be obtained, not every foe avoided. But a living species must have acquired a behaviour that strikes a compromise in avoiding the deadliest foes and satisfying the most urgent needs from the sources of easiest access, so that it does survive.”

„Individuals which — by chance or intelligence — change their behaviour accordingly will be more favoured, and thus selected.”

„Behaviour, though not itself inherited, may yet speed up the process of evolution by orders of magnitude.”

„A mathematical truth is timeless, it does not come into being when we discover it. Yet its discovery is a very real event, it may be an emotion like a great gift from a fairy.”