Quotes About Adaptation

We are very much like birds that have lived too long in a cage to which we return even when we get the chance to fly away. We have grown so accustomed to our faults that we can barely imagine what life would be like without them. The prospect of change makes us dizzy.

We have to build our lives out of what materials we have. It's as though we were given a heap of blocks and told to build a house.

New things are easier to do than old familiar things when there's going to be a change, Betsy decided profoundly.

That Jed Wakeman is *nice*, Emily remarked aloud when she reached her own room. He was, she thought, such a happy normal person, so - outgiving. Her eyes chanced to fall on Don's picture inspecting her disdainfully. She took it up and changed it from the front row of pictures to the back. As she did so she wished she could put him that easily into the background of her life.

Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.

We no longer have natural selection. We have unnatural selection. Survival of the fittest has been replaced by survival of the fakest.

The wonderful thing about reality is that it is highly flexible. One minute, all is doom; the next, everything is abloom with possibility.

Anxiety is very accommodating. Minutes ago, Stevie's anxiety was all about failure. It neatly converted itself into worry about places called Bounce Houses and not having hot water or air-conditioning. It was perfectly ready to bring the snakes to the party. It's a big tent. All problems are welcome.

People don't change . . . You just sort of have to take them like they are.

Gators are just something you have to accept where I come from. Most don't go anywhere near the houses, even though there are lots of delicious children and dogs there. Every once in a while, though, an alligator has a lightbulb moment and decides to take a stroll and see the world a bit.

No one gets Paris after one visit. No one.

What you don't realize at the time is that you're not seeing the full picture, You don't think about the fact that things will change. Things always change.

I think I'm fine. Maybe it hasn't hit yet. Is that bad? It's not bad or good. It just is. That's something you'll find out if you decide to go into this line of work. You have to take things as they are, not how you hear they're supposed to be.

It's not bad or good. It just is. That's something you'll find out if you decide to go into this line of work. You have to take things as they are, not how you hear they're supposed to be.

Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.

The greatest food for the greatest number—that's my slogan. At a time of desperate public need, it's our duty to sacrifice our luxurious tastes and eat our way back to prosperity by adapting ourselves to the simple, wholesome foodstuff on which the peoples of the Orient have so nobly subsisted for centuries. There's a great deal that we could learn from the peoples of the Orient.

Nunca perdemos del todo aquello por lo que vivimos. Quizá a veces cambiemos su forma, sobre todo si hemos cometido un error; pero el propósito sigue el mismo, y somos nosotros quines concebimos su forma.

To say that that which was true in the 17th century cannot possibly be true today, because we travel in jet planes while they traveled in horse carts—is like saying that modern men do not need food, as men did in the past, because they are wearing trenchcoats and slacks, instead-of powdered wigs and hoop skirts.

Instead of building new furnaces, thought Rearden, he was now running a losing race to keep the old ones going; instead of starting new ventures, new research, new experiments in the use of Rearden Metal, he was spending the whole of his energy on a quest for sources of iron ore: like the men at the dawn of the Iron Age—he thought—but with less hope.

He was accustomed to hostility; this kind of benevolence was more offensive than hostility. He shrugged; he thought that he would be out of here soon and back in the simple, clean reality of his own office.

In living entities, nature does not permit stillness: when one ceases to grow, one proceeds to disintegrate—in the mental realm no less than in the physical.

Life in the Islamic Republic was as capricious as the month of April, when short periods of sunshine will suddenly give way to showers and storms.

Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is useful as bread.

Dreams, Mr Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality?