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Our Western science, ever since the 17th century, has been obsessed with the notion of control, of man dominating nature. This obsession has led to disaster.

Fritjof Capra

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Fritjof Capra
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: February 1
Environmentalist
Physicist
Writer
Vienna
Austria
Since
Dominating
Science
Obsession
Nature
Obsessed
Ever
Disaster
Men
Notion
Western
Century
Control

More quotes by Fritjof Capra

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In the end, the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity.
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The elements of life are dynamic patterns of mass and energy, events rather than objects.
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Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science but man needs both.
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Doing work which has to be done over and over again helps us recognize the natural cycles of growth and decay, of birth and death, and thus become aware of the dynamic order of the universe. Ordinary work, as the root meaning of the term indicates, is work that is in harmony with the order we perceive in the natural environment.
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With the subsequent strong support from cybernetics , the concepts of systems thinking and systems theory became integral parts of the established scientific language, and led to numerous new methodologies and applications -- systems engineering, systems analysis, systems dynamics, and so on.
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A sustainable human community is designed in such a manner that its ways of life, technologies, and social institutions honor, support, and cooperate with nature's inherent ability to sustain life.
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The more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.
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Modern physics has... revealed that every sub-atomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance a pulsating process of creation and destruction.
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Ecology and spirituality are fundamentally connected, because deep ecological awareness, ultimately, is spiritual awareness.
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One of the key insights of the systems approach has been the realization that the network is a pattern that is common to all life. Wherever we see life, we see networks.
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The term paradigm, from the Greek paradeigma (pattern), was used by Kuhn to denote a conceptual framework shared by a community of scientists and providing them with model problems and solutions
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Organizations need to undergo fundamental changes, both in order to adapt to the new business environment and to become ecologically sustainable.
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Whenever the essential nature of things is analysed by the intellect, it must seem absurd or paradoxical. This has always been recognized by the mystics, but has become a problem in science only very recently.
Fritjof Capra
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The creativity and adaptability of life expresses itself through the spontaneous emergence of novelty at critical points of instability. Every human organization contains both designed and emergent structures. The challenge is to find the right balance between the creativity of emergence and the stability of design.
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Subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.
Fritjof Capra
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The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realise that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.
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During periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden clarifying insights which give so much joy and delight.
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Genuine mental health would involve a balanced interplay of both modes of experience, a way of life in which one's identification with the ego is playful and tentative rather than absolute and mandatory, while the concern with material possessions is pragmatic rather than obsessive.
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If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago... This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism.
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In Hinduism, Shiva the Cosmic Dancer, is perhaps the most perfect personification of the dynamic universe. Through his dance, Shiva sustains the manifold phenomena in the world, unifying all things by immersing them in his rhythm and making them participate in the dance - a magnificent image of the dynamic unity of the Universe.
Fritjof Capra