Rene Dubos Quotes

#1. A sense of continuity with the rest of creation is a form of religious experience essential to sanity.

Rene Dubos

#2. Search for the cause may be a hopeless pursuit because most disease states are the indirect outcome of a constellation of circumstances.

Rene Dubos

#3. The most important pathological effects of pollution are extremely delayed and indirect.

Rene Dubos

#4. What happens in the mind of man is always reflected in the disease of his body.

Rene Dubos

#5. Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back.

Rene Dubos

#6. Life is short, the art is long, the problems pressing.

Rene Dubos

#7. Man shapes himself through decisions that shape his environment.

Rene Dubos

#8. You cannot see the Milky Way in New York City any more ... We risk the loss of our sensual perception. And if you lose those, naturally, you try to compensate by other stimulations, by very loud noises, or by bright lights or drugs.

Rene Dubos

#9. More can be learned from what works than from what fails.

Rene Dubos

#10. Think globally, act locally": "Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.

Rene Dubos

#11. Sometimes the more measurable drives out the most important.

Rene Dubos

#12. Men as a rule are more preoccupied with the dangers that threaten their life than interested in the biological forces on which they depend for a constructive existence.

Rene Dubos

#13. The word "wilderness" occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory.

Rene Dubos

#14. There is an unbroken continuum from the wisdom of the body to the wisdom of the mind, from the wisdom of the individual to the wisdom of the race.

Rene Dubos

#15. It is a disturbing fact that Western civilization, which claims to have achieved the highest standard of health in history, finds itself compelled to spend ever-increasing sums for the control of disease.

Rene Dubos

#16. Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.

Rene Dubos

#17. The mechanisms of vis medicatrix naturae - the most healing power of nature - are so effective that most diseases are self-terminating.

Rene Dubos

#18. Human life is now molded to a large extent by the changes that man has brought about in his external environment and by his attempts at controlling body and soul.

Rene Dubos

#19. Each civilization has its own kind of pestilence and can control it only by reforming itself.

Rene Dubos

#20. Each human being is unique, unprecedented, unrepeatable.

Rene Dubos

#21. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.

Rene Dubos

#22. Each type of civilization has had diseases peculiar to it and at each period the various social groups in any community also have differed in this regard.

Rene Dubos

#23. Biologically, man is still the great amateur of the animal kingdom; he is unique in his lack of anatomical and physiological specialization.

Rene Dubos

#24. Social evolution may be the result of intention, but it rarely, if ever, produces the result intended.

Rene Dubos

#25. Gauss replied, when asked how soon he expected to reach certain mathematical conclusions, that he had them long ago, all he was worrying about was how to reach them!

Rene Dubos

#26. Man not only survives and functions in his environment, he shapes it and he is shaped by it.

Rene Dubos

#27. Man could escape danger only by renouncing adventure, by abandoning that which has given to the human condition its unique character and genius among the rest of living things.

Rene Dubos

#28. Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.

Rene Dubos

#29. Clearly, health and disease cannot be defined merely in terms of anatomical, physiological, or mental attributes. Their real measure is the ability of the individual to function in a manner acceptable to himself and to the group of which he is a part.

Rene Dubos

#30. One may wonder indeed whether the pretense of superior health is not itself rapidly becoming a mental aberration.

Rene Dubos

#31. In man, at least, satisfaction is commonly followed by boredom.

Rene Dubos

#32. But solving problems of disease is not the same thing as creating health and happiness. ( ... ) Health and happiness are the expression of the manner in which the individual responds and adapts to the challenges that he meets in everyday life.

Rene Dubos

#33. Whatever his inhibitions and tastes, Western man believes in the natural holiness of seminudism and raw vegetable juice, because these have become for him symbols of unadultered nature.

Rene Dubos

#34. Wherever human beings are concerned, trend is not destiny.

Rene Dubos

#35. A very large percentage of illnesses are the expressions of inadequate responses to the environment.

Rene Dubos

#36. The very process of living is a continual interplay between the individual and his environment, often taking the form of a struggle resulting in injury or disease.

Rene Dubos

#37. The belief that we can manage the Earth and improve on Nature is probably the ultimate expression of human conceit, but it has deep roots in the past and is almost universal.

Rene Dubos

#38. To ward off disease or recover health, people as a rule find it easier to depend on healers than to attempt the more difficult task of living wisely.

Rene Dubos

#39. Eradication of microbial disease is a will-o'-the-wisp; pursuing it leads into a morass of hazy biological concepts and half truths.

Rene Dubos

#40. Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious manifestations, yet some of their worst enemies creep on them unobtrusively.

Rene Dubos

#41. With reference to life there is not one nature; there are only associations of states and circumstances, varying from place to place and from time to time.

Rene Dubos

#42. There is a demon in technology. It was put there by man and man will have to exorcise it before technological civilization can achieve the eighteenth-century ideal of humane civilized life.

Rene Dubos