The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A meme is simply a unit of memorable cultural information. It can be as small as a tune or a metaphor, as big as a philosophy or religious concept. Hell is a meme; so are the Pythagorean theorem, A Hard Day’s Night, the wheel, Hamlet, pragmatism, harmony, “Where’s the beef?,” and of course the notion of the meme itself.” (The Botany of Desire Quotes)
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“By the grace of this forgetting, we temporarily shelve our inherited ways of looking and see things as if for the first time.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Curiously, growing Papaver somniferum in America is legal—unless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug, when, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of “manufacturing a controlled substance.” Evidently the Old Testament and the criminal code both make a connection between forbidden plants and knowledge.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower’s point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Huxley suggests that the reason there aren’t nearly as many mystics and visionaries walking around today, as compared to the Middle Ages, is the improvement in nutrition. Vitamin deficiencies wreak havoc on brain function and probably explain a large portion of visionary experiences in the past.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person’s mind, that mind’s connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Memory is the enemy of wonder”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Monoculture is where the logic of nature collides with the logic of economics; which logic will ultimately prevail can never be in doubt.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Most recently, as the medical value of marijuana has been rediscovered, medicine has been searching for ways to “pharmaceuticalize” the plant—find a way to harness its easily accessible benefits in a patch or inhaler that doctors can prescribe, corporations patent, and governments regulate. Whenever possible, Paracelsus’s lab-coated descendants have synthesized the active ingredients in plant drugs, allowing medicine to dispense with the plant itself—and any reminders of its pagan past.” (The Botany of Desire Quotes)
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Plants are nature’s alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Plants are so unlike people that it’s very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication. Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Queen of Night is as close to black as a flower gets, though in fact it is a dark and glossy maroonish purple. Its hue is so dark, however, that it appears to draw more light into itself than it reflects, a kind of floral black hole. In the garden, depending on the the angle of the sun, the blossoms of a Queen of Night may read as positive or negative space, as flowers or shadows of a flower.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Resistance is essentially a form of coevolution that occurs when a given population is threatened with extinction.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Sweetness is a desire that starts on the tongue with the sense of taste but doesn’t end there. Or at least it didn’t end there, back when the experience of sweetness was so special that the word served as a metaphor for a certain type of perfection… The best land was said to be sweet; so were the most pleasing sounds; the most persuasive talk; the loveliest views, the most refined people.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: “the greater fool theory.” Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay thousands for a tulip bulb (or for that matter an Internet stock), as long as there is an even greater fool out there willing to pay even more, doing so is the most logical thing in the world.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“The virus altered the eye of the beholder. That this change came at the expense of the beheld suggests that beauty in nature does not necessarily bespeak health, nor necessarily redound to the benefit of the beautiful.” (The Botany of Desire Quotes)
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“The workings of consciousness are both more and less materialistic than we usually think: chemical reactions can induce thoughts, but thoughts can also induce chemical reactions.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“There is another word for this extremist noticing—this sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness, by the already-been-theres and seen-thats of the adult mind—and that word, of course, is wonder.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
“Yes, forgetting can be a curse, especially as we age. But forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering. Think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn’t quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember.”
Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire
