Quotes About Adaptation

Everyday ... life confronts us with new problems to be solved which force us to adjust our old programs accordingly.

When you were a tadpole and I was a fish in the Palaozoic time And side by side in the sluggish tide, we sprawled in the ooze and slime.

Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good.

You can beat the Bear once, but never the same way twice.

Sometimes what you want to do has to fail so you won't.

We will be victorious if we have not forgotten how to learn.

An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.

I have called the principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved by the term of Natural Selection.

Mothers can get weaned as well as babies.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea. Why, as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones.

I feel a recipe is only a theme, which an intelligent cook can play each time with a variation.

Set a beggar on horseback, and he will ride a gallop.

If you always live with those who are lame, you will yourself learn to limp.

The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well.

We define genius as the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.

It is a common observation that those who dwell continually upon their expectations are apt to become oblivious to the requirements of their actual situation.

Common sense does not ask an impossible chessboard, but takes the one before it and plays the game.

Everyone must row with the oars he has.

A windmill is eternally at work to accomplish one end, although it shifts with every variation of the weathercock, and assumes ten different positions in a day.

I have an almost complete disregard of precedent and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things always have been done. ... I defy the tyranny of precedent. I cannot afford the luxury of a closed mind. I go for anything new that might improve the past.

How can you govern a country with two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Custom reconciles us to everything.