Claude Bernard Quotes

All biologic phenomena act to adjust: there are no biologic actions other than adjustments. Adjustment is another name for Equilibrium. Equilibrium is the Universal, or that which has nothing external to derange it.

All the vital mechanisms, varied as they are, have only one object, that of preserving constant the conditions of life in the internal environment.

Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself.

The stability of the internal medium is a primary condition for the freedom and independence of certain living bodies in relation to the environment surrounding them.

Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.

It is where life is fundamental and free that men develop the vision needed to reveal the human soul in the blossoms it puts forth.

I think the Buddha presents an image of someone who believes in self-control. I think he's offering, perhaps, a critique of the romantic idea of the passions being this wonderful source of life or vitality that define you or your writing.

More than anything else, I believe it's our decisions, not the conditions of our lives that determine our destiny.

The Mind: a beautiful servant, a dangerous master.

The best we can do then, in response to our incomprehensible and dangerous world, is to practice holding equilibrium internally - no matter what insanity is transpiring out there.

I live by my own rules (reviewed, revised, and approved by my wife).. but still my own.

Life is like dancing...changing all the time.

But a risk-free life wasn't much of a life, really, and if she was going to change, she might as well start now.

People vastly overestimate the ability of central planners to improve on the independent action of diverse individuals. What I've learned watching regulators is that they almost always make things worse. If regulators did nothing, the self-correcting mechanisms of the market would mitigate most problems with more finesse. And less cost.

It's hard keeping everything the same when the same things look and feel so different

A work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the subject it may represent.

If you are an effective manager of your self, your discipline comes from within; it is a function of your independent will. You are a disciple, a follower, of your own deep values and their source. And you have the will, the integrity, to subordinate your feelings, your impulses, your moods to those values.

The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.

Everything that possesses life dies if it has to live in uncongenial surroundings.

Like hunger or thirst, the instinct for balance is built into the human body.

If you are an effective manager of your self, your discipline comes from within; it is a function of your independent will.

Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one can turn and turn about, and make old look like new; but there's no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are.

The physiological combustion theory takes as its starting point the fundamental principle that the amount of heat that arises from the combustion of a given substance is an invariable quantity-i.e., one independent of the circumstances accompanying the combustion-from which it is more specifically concluded that the chemical effect of the combustible materials undergoes no quantitative change even as a result of the vital process, or that the living organism, with all its mysteries and marvels, is not capable of generating heat out of nothing.