Ludwig von Bertalanffy Short Quotes

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Wholeness [Ganzheit], Gestalt, is the primary attribute of life.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
The stream of life is maintained only in continuous flow of matter through all groups of organisms.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
What in the whole denotes a causal equilibrium process, appears for the part as a teleological event.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Apparently, the isomorphisms of laws rest in our cognition on the one hand, and in reality on the other.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Progress is only possible by passing from a state of undifferentiated wholeness to differentiation of parts.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
We are confronted with problems of organized complexity... organization runs through all levels of reality and science.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
A general proof is difficult because of the lack of general criteria for the existence of steady states, but it can be given for special cases.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
It is an empirical rule that living, evolutionary, psychological, social, etc., systems tend toward increasing differentiation and organization.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
The evolution of science is not a movement in an intellectual vacuum; rather it is both an expression and a driving force of the historical process.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
The characteristic of life does not lie in a distinctiveness of single life processes. [Lebensvorgänge], but rather in a certain order among all the processes.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
We completely agree that description by differential equations is not only a clumsy but, in principle, inadequate way to deal with many problems of organization.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
What we call growth of even a simple organism is a tremendously complex phenomenon from the biochemical, physiological, cytological, and morphological viewpoints.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
The characteristic of the organism is first that it is more than the sum of its parts and second that the single processes are ordered for the maintenance of the whole.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
General Systems Theory... possibly the model of the world as a great organization can help to reinforce the sense of reverence for the living which we have almost lost.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
There appears to exist a general systems laws which apply to any system of a certain type, irrespective of the particular properties of the system and of the elements involved.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
The fact that a theory so vague, so insufficiently verifiable, and so far from the criteria otherwise applied in 'hard' science has become a dogma can only be explained on sociological grounds.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
While we can conceive of a sum [or aggregate] as being composed gradually, a system as a total of parts with its [multiplicative] interrelations has to be conceived of as being composed instantly.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy