Tout est poison, rien n'est poison, tout est une question de dose. Everything is poisonous, nothing is poisonous, it is all a matter of dose.
Claude BernardRead
Now, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Living organisms are intricate machines with remarkable abilities driven by complex mechanisms.
In this quote, Claude Bernard emphasizes the extraordinary nature of living organisms, likening them to machines but highlighting their complexity and the delicate systems that enable life. This perspective reflects the intricate arrangements of biological systems and the sophistication of life itself, challenging us to appreciate the marvels of nature and biology.
Themes
OrganismMachineComplexityBiologyMechanism
In practice
Example use cases
In a biology class discussing the nature of life and living systems.
More from Claude Bernard
All quotes βWhen a physician is called to a patient, he should decide on the diagnosis, then the prognosis, and then the treatment. ... Physicians must know the evolution of the disease, its duration and gravity in order to predict its course and outcome. Here statistics intervene to guide physicians, by teaching them the proportion of mortal cases, and if observation has also shown that the successful and unsuccessful cases can be recognized by certain signs, then the prognosis is more certain.
Claude BernardRead
The goal of scientific physicians in their own science ... is to reduce the indeterminate. Statistics therefore apply only to cases in which the cause of the facts observed is still indeterminate.
Claude BernardRead
Theories are like a stairway; by climbing, science widens its horizon more and more, because theories embody and necessarily include proportionately more facts as they advance.
Claude BernardRead
True science teaches us to doubt and, in ignorance, to refrain.
Claude BernardRead
The experimenter who does not know what he is looking for will not understand what he finds.
Claude BernardRead
Similar quotes
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We know so much about planets and the universe and small particles and we do not know anything about the inner state of our own bodies, we do not know about this microcosm we have inside our skin.
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There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end ofthe search for the ultimate laws of nature.
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Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eye.
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By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.
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