Rene Dubos Quotes

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

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.

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

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

The earth is literally our mother, not only because we depend on her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human sepcies has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution. Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.

As long as mankind is made up of independent individuals with free will, there cannot be any social status quo. Men will develop new urges, and these will give rise to new problems, which will require ever new solutions. Human life implies adventure, and there is no adventure without struggles and dangers.

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.

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

Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.

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

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

Sometimes the more measurable drives out the most important.

The mechanisms of vis medicatrix naturæ—the most healing power of nature—are so effective that most diseases are self-terminating.

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.

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

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.

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

Wherever human beings are concerned, trend is not destiny.

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.

It is often by a trivial, even an anecdotal decision, that we direct our activities into a certain channel, and thus determine which of the potential expressions of our individuality become manifest. Usually we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet toward which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.

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

... 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.

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

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

Any attempt to shape the world and modify human personality in order to create a self-chosen pattern of life involves many unknown consequences. Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back. The multiplicity of determinants which affect biological systems limits the power of the experimental method to predict their trends and behavior.