Quotes About Adaptation

The habit of mobility had become ingrained.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present," he told Congress. "As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.

Acknowledge when failed policies demand a change in direction.

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Kaleidoscopes and pendulums—Roosevelt's images connoted an abiding belief in the hard lesson of his crucible philosophy: All one can do is to prepare oneself, to wait in readiness for what might come.

If he could not go out into the world, the world could come to him.

All one can do is to prepare oneself, to wait in readiness for what might come.

Do leaders shape the times or do the times summon their leaders?

The world was far more complicated and nuanced than his categorical moral vision had led him to believe. The ability to learn from the excesses of his egocentric behavior, to alter course, to profit from error, was essential to his growth.

If a person focused too much on a future that could not be controlled, he would become, Roosevelt acknowledged, too "careful, calculating, cautious in word and act.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are

When he came upon a passage that Struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there until he did get paper," she recalled, "and then he would rewrite it" and keep it in a scrapbook so that he could preserve it.

acknowledge errors and learn from

If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.

We try to have things both ways. We've always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn't treat us by rule?

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade. (So why write novels? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living as if ...)

You talk as if—a person is a person. A man is what he is. He can't be anything else. You can't change that.' 'Well then, I think that's the real difference between us. Because I believe you can change it.' 'Then I don't follow you. And I don't want to. Bad enough to cope with what one is, instead of complicating things even more.

For better or worse, we are prepared to experiment with ourselves, to try and be different kinds of people. But you simply submitted to something.

That's what life is, getting used to things that are really intolerable…" Her eyes reddened and filled, and again she determinedly blinked them clear.

That's what life is, getting used to things that are really intolerable.

Now, I am not Anna, I have no will, I can't move out of a situation once it has started, I just go along with it.

To hold in one's mind that a central transforming force is always at work in the world - the force of evolution itself - enables one to see that a person may be learning while not knowing he is doing so.

Because if what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again. Or even a month the way my thoughts are changing at the moment. Your thoughts are the last thing you can rely on.

Ci siamo mai chiesti quali cambiamenti si determinarono nel nostro cervello quando la gente cominciò a leggere invece di ascoltare?