Top 35 René Dubos Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Each human being is unique, unprecedented, unrepeatable.”

— René Dubos

2. “Man not only survives and functions in his environment, he shapes it and he is shaped by it.”

— René Dubos

3. “Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.”

— René Dubos

4. “Clearly, health and disease cannot be defined merely in terms of anatomical, physiological, or mental attributes. Their real measure is the ability of the individual to function in a manner acceptable to himself and to the group of which he is a part.”

— René Dubos

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5. “What happens in the mind of man is always reflected in the disease of his body.”

— René Dubos

6. “The earth is literally our mother, not only because we depend on her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human sepcies has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution. Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.”

— René Dubos

7. “Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.”

— René Dubos

8. “Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back.”

— René Dubos

9. “Man shapes himself through decisions that shape his environment.”

— René Dubos

10. “To ward off disease or recover health, people as a rule find it easier to depend on healers than to attempt the more difficult task of living wisely.”

— René Dubos

11. “Each civilization has its own kind of pestilence and can control it only by reforming itself.”

— René Dubos

12. “There is a demon in technology. It was put there by man and man will have to exorcise it before technological civilization can achieve the eighteenth-century ideal of humane civilized life.”

— René Dubos

13. “A sense of continuity with the rest of creation is a form of religious experience essential to sanity.”

— René Dubos

14. “The belief that we can manage the Earth and improve on Nature is probably the ultimate expression of human conceit, but it has deep roots in the past and is almost universal.”

— René Dubos

15. “Sometimes the more measurable drives out the most important.”

— René Dubos

16. “The very process of living is a continual interplay between the individual and his environment, often taking the form of a struggle resulting in injury or disease.”

— René Dubos

17. “It is a disturbing fact that Western civilization, which claims to have achieved the highest standard of health in history, finds itself compelled to spend ever-increasing sums for the control of disease.”

— René Dubos

18. “Man could escape danger only by renouncing adventure, by abandoning that which has given to the human condition its unique character and genius among the rest of living things.”

— René Dubos

19. “The most important pathological effects of pollution are extremely delayed and indirect.”

— René Dubos

20. “There is an unbroken continuum from the wisdom of the body to the wisdom of the mind, from the wisdom of the individual to the wisdom of the race.”

— René Dubos

21. “Gauss replied, when asked how soon he expected to reach certain mathematical conclusions, that he had them long ago, all he was worrying about was how to reach them!”

— René Dubos

22. “Wherever human beings are concerned, trend is not destiny.”

— René Dubos

23. “Eradication of microbial disease is a will-o’-the-wisp; pursuing it leads into a morass of hazy biological concepts and half truths.”

— René Dubos

24. “Life is short, the art is long, the problems pressing.”

— René Dubos

25. “The word “wilderness” occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory.”

— René Dubos

26. “It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.”

— René Dubos

27. “Human life implies adventure, and there is no adventure without struggles and dangers.”

— René Dubos

28. “Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious manifestations, yet some of their worst enemies creep on them unobtrusively.”

— René Dubos

29. “Human life is now molded to a large extent by the changes that man has brought about in his external environment and by his attempts at controlling body and soul.”

— René Dubos

30. “One may wonder indeed whether the pretense of superior health is not itself rapidly becoming a mental aberration.”

— René Dubos

31. “In man, at least, satisfaction is commonly followed by boredom.”

— René Dubos

32. “With reference to life there is not one nature; there are only associations of states and circumstances, varying from place to place and from time to time.”

— René Dubos

33. “Whatever his inhibitions and tastes, Western man believes in the natural holiness of seminudism and raw vegetable juice, because these have become for him symbols of unadultered nature.”

— René Dubos

34. “Biologically, man is still the great amateur of the animal kingdom; he is unique in his lack of anatomical and physiological specialization.”

— René Dubos

35. “Social evolution may be the result of intention, but it rarely, if ever, produces the result intended.”

— René Dubos