Quotes About Adaptation

We don't all need to be geniuses; some of us just need to practical applicators and adapters.

All of us are subjected to somebody else's power at some point. So once in a while you kiss ass. So what? Either you make your peace with that early, or you end up living your life as a crank and a misfit.

Freedom, he was learning, was not a set point, like the temperature at which water freezes, but something mutable, a moving target.

A positive. What you've got to believe, Kit, is that there are very few situations in life that are one hundred percent bad. Did you know that two years after becoming paralyzed, most paraplegics say that their life is better off than when they could walk? We are an adaptive species. Try to embrace that.

Don't assume that what happens in our future invalidates what happened in our past.

Things happen and you change directions

Bees are forgiving animals, and will tolerate a good deal of rearrangement in their lives for whatever new fad sweeps the beekeeping industry—plastic foundation and frames, double queen management, tar-paper wraps for winter—but the best beekeepers I know are those who let the bees themselves, not equipment manufacturers, be their teachers.

Today my life has frogs aplenty and this delights me, but I am not so pleased with myself. My life hasn't turned out as I expected it would, for one thing. For another, I no longer know all about anything. I don't even know the first thing about frogs, for instance.

Being able to choose to act differently, even while feeling the old way, may be the most liberating growth you can accomplish.

I think Jane Austen should write something a bit more modern.

It's amazing what you can get used to, given time.

My wish is that we design the future of learning. We don't want to be spare parts for a great human computer.

A city like Bombay, like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population, is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else. And unlike others who may have been equally uncomfortable wherever they came from, these people got up and moved. As I have discovered, having once moved, it is difficult to stop moving.

The first thing that a new migrant sends to his family back home isn't money; it's a story. Of the arduous journey here, the snow on the streets, the rude immigration agent or the kindly social worker; the lights of the Eiffel Tower or the cold reception from the cousins with whom he's staying.

That was the inherent contradiction. This was a nation backed into a corner. They did not want to open up, and yet they had no choice but to move toward engagement if they wanted to survive. They had built the entire foundation of their country on isolationism and wanting to kill Americans and South Koreans, yet they needed to learn English and feed their children with foreign money.

Such is the condition of a first-generation immigrant for whom everything is separated into now and then, into before the move and after.

The entire country was like a linguistic and cultural Galápagos.

Sweat more during peace: bleed less during war

Be good. It'll be a new experience.

811. Focus on the here and now, forget yesterday's behavior, and don't predict tomorrow's. Every day with ADHD is different from the next.

Even the rats are drowning,' Alex said. Nah,' Kevin said. 'They've been taking swimming lessons at the Y.

Just like genes, the memes have no foresight. They cannot be expected to foresee that almost anything might happen. They might even, in the process of diverting our energies from the genes, just wipe us out.

Memes, like genes, are selected against the background of other memes in the meme pool. The result is that gangs of mutually compatible memes – coadapted meme complexes or memeplexes – are found cohabiting in individual brains. This is not because selection has chosen them as a group, but because each separate member of the group tends to be favoured when its environment happens to be dominated by the others.