Creatures Quote by Ursula Goodenough

Early humans, bursting with questions about Nature but with limited understanding of its dynamics, explained things in terms of supernatural persons and person-animals who…

— Ursula Goodenough

Human consensus does not generate reality. Were it able to do so, the Sun would have taken to orbiting the Earth some time ago.

— Ursula Goodenough

Reverence is the sense that there is something larger than the self, larger even than the human, to which one accords respect and awe…

— Ursula Goodenough

Perhaps we should all settle down and think about what's good in the world and what we want to do here. If we find…

— Ursula Goodenough

The evolution of the cosmos invokes in me a sense of mystery; the increase in biodiversity invokes the response of humility; and an understanding…

— Ursula Goodenough

I have come to understand that the self, my self, is inherently sacred. By virtue of its own improbability, its own miracle, its own…

— Ursula Goodenough

The biochemistry and biophysics are the notes required for life; they conspire, collectively, to generate the real unit of life, the organism. The intermediate…

— Ursula Goodenough

Human memory, they say, is like a coat closet: The most enduring outcome of a formal education is that it creates rows of coat…

— Ursula Goodenough

“Life, we can now say, is getting something to happen against the odds, and remembering how to do it.”

— Ursula Goodenough

It is as we respond to the understandings and feelings inherent in . . . art that we acquire much of our truth, much…

— Ursula Goodenough

The religious naturalist is provisioned with tales of natural emergence that are, to my mind, far more magical than traditional miracles. Emergence is inherent…

— Ursula Goodenough

The Big Bang, the formation of sars and planets, the origin and evolution of life on this planet, the advent of human consciousness and…

— Ursula Goodenough