Olga Tokarczuk Quotes

I see myself as a scientist who is interested in what's going on inside of us.

I have always had a fascination about what's inside a human being.

Physiology has spawned many biological sciences, amongst them my own field of pharmacology.

Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our own organs, the most precious and amazing things we own. Until something goes wrong, we barely give them thought. This seems strange to me. How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interesting than the inside of our own bodies?

I am fascinated by the human body and all its evolutions.

I'm actually pretty scientifically interested. I have a lot of friends who are doctors, so the idea of the virus and the synapses in the brain and how the nervous system works was actually all pretty familiar to me.

In my second year, after moving to the Medical School, I began the courses of Anatomy and Physiology. I had begun to see that I was interested in cells and their functions.

From a scientist's perspective, to understand everything that you need to know about human beings, you only have to tinker with all the mechanical parts of genes and the brain until there are no more secrets left.

No knowledge can be more satisfactory to a man than that of his own frame, its parts, their functions and actions.

Ever since I've been young I've been fascinated by the human body. I've written songs about it, but you can become quite morbid if you think about it too much - paranoid and a hypochondriac.

People love watching medical dramas - they also love watching documentaries about the workings of the brain.

The human body has two ends on it: one to create with and one to sit on. Sometimes people get their ends reversed. When this happens they need a kick in the seat of the pants.

Man himself is a mysterious object, and the tools to probe his physiologic nature and function have developed only slowly through the millennia.

When I was 10 years old, a cousin of mine took me on a tour of his medical school. And as a special treat, he took me to the pathology lab and took a real human brain out of the jar and placed it in my hands. And there it was, the seat of human consciousness, the powerhouse of the human body, sitting in my hands.

When I went to the University, the medical school was the only place where one could hope to find the means to study life, its nature, its origins, and its ills.

There is something fundamentally fascinating about the mechanics, I guess, of the human body and where consciousness and mind exist, and what you can do with the mechanics of the body while keeping those intact, and where those two cross over.

We dwell in the house of the body, but its perfection and intricate life are the work of a wisdom which never relaxes dominion over a single cell.

Indeed, our everyday world presents intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum, and that is where 99 per cent of scientists focus their efforts. Even the smallest insect, with its intricate structure, is far more complex than either an atom or a star.

Science has revealed that the human body is made up of millions and millions of atoms... For example, I am made up of 5.8x10 27 atoms.

Mainly I study the sense of touch and what the molecules are that transduce touch. And I use mutants in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans to look at that problem.

What's very interesting is that when we look at human bodies, we look at our body as a singular entity when it turns out, no, if I could reduce us to a small size as the size of a cell and put you inside your body, rather than seeing a singular entity, what you would see is a metropolis with 50 trillion citizens.

Most of the people who are engaged in the subjects that I look into are pretty interesting. Whether its sex researchers or someone who's devoted their career to saliva or somebody who does research with cadavers, there's an inherent fascination in the subject matter of their work.

Everyone and everything that shows up in our life is a reflection of something that is happening inside of us.

You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and your free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

The body is an amazing system.