“What constitutes the primordium of the adult parasite [ Rhizocephala ]? What can be injected through the narrow opening of the dart's hypodermic device? …Imagine going through such complexity as nauplius, cyprid, and kentrogon - and then paring yourself down to just a few cells for a quick and hazardous transition to the adult stage. What a minimal bridge at such a crucial transition! …But other species have achieved the ultimate reduction to a single cell! The dart injects just one cell into the host's interior, and the two parts of the life cyle maintain their indispensable continuity by an absolutely minimal connection - as though, within the rhizocephalan life cycle, nature has inserted a stage analogous to the fertilized egg that establishes minimal connection between generations in ordinary sexual organisms.”

— Stephen Jay Gould, book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 363
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

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Stephen Jay Gould274

American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002

Lewis Thomas (1913–1993) American physician, poet and educator

A Long Line of Cells : Collected Essays (1990), p. 244

“We can assume that in a relatively short time — perhaps within 100 million years — the one celled organism evolved into a colony of cells. With the further passage of time, groups of cells within those colonies assumed specialized functions of food-gathering, digestion, the structural features of an outer skin, and so on; thus began the stage of evolution leading to the complex, many-celled creatures which dominate life today.
The fossil record contains no trace of these preliminary stages in the development of many-celled organisms. The first clues to the existence of relatively advanced forms of life consist of a few barely discernible tracks, presumably made in the primeval slime by soft, wriggling wormlike animals. These are found in rocks about one billion years old. These meager remains are the earliest traces of many-celled animal life on the planet.”

Robert Jastrow (1925–2008) American astronomer

Red Giants and White Dwarfs : Man's Descent from the Stars (1971), p. 249.

“It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Bk. 1, ch. 3, sct. 2
Source: The Ministry of Fear (1943)

“If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.”

Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist

Vol. I, Part III: The Evolution of Life, Ch. 3 : General Aspects of the Evolution Hypothesis; compare: "As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for his birth, / So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man", Alfred Lord Tennyson, Maud (1855)
Principles of Biology (1864)

“But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant”

Jeffrey Eugenides (1960) Novelist, short story writer, teacher

“Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.”

Daniel Dennett book Sweet Dreams

Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (2005), p. 2

“Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Self-Reliance

“Every cell from a cell.”
Omnis cellula e cellula

Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) German doctor, anthropologist, public health activist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist and politician

“In America all too few blows are struck into flesh. We kill the spirit here, we are experts at that. We use psychic bullets and kill each other cell by cell.”

Norman Mailer book The Presidential Papers

The Fourth Presidential Paper — Foreign Affairs : Letter To Castro
The Presidential Papers (1963)

“We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

McKenna interview (1992)
Context: I love child things because there's so much mystery when you're a child. When you're a child, something as simple as a tree doesn't make sense. You see it in the distance and it looks small, but as you go closer, it seems to grow — you haven't got a handle on the rules when you're a child. We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.

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Stephen Jay Gould274

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