Quotes About Adaptation

importance of constant learning as the key to being a successful ruler.

The Europeans, who had been cut off from the mainstream of civilization since the fall of Rome, eagerly drank in the new knowledge, put on the new clothes, listened to the new music, ate the new foods, and enjoyed a rapidly escalating standard of living in almost every regard.

Europeans experienced a Renaissance, literally a rebirth, but it was not the ancient world of Greece and Rome being reborn: It was the Mongol Empire, picked up, transferred, and adapted by the Europeans to their own needs and culture.

Under the widespread influences from the paper and printing, gunpowder and firearms, and the spread of the navigational compass and other maritime equipment, Europeans experienced a Renaissance, literally a rebirth, but it was not the ancient world of Greece and Rome being reborn: It was the Mongol Empire, picked up, transferred, and adapted by the Europeans to their own needs and culture

The Mongols made no technological breakthroughs, founded no new religions, wrote few books or dramas, and gave the world no new crops or methods of agriculture. Their own craftsmen could not weave cloth, cast metal, make pottery, or even bake bread. They manufactured neither porcelain nor pottery, painted no pictures, and built no buildings. Yet, as their army conquered culture after culture, they collected and passed all of these skills from one civilization to the next.

as Google CEO Larry Page put it in his 2014 TED talk: "The main thing that has caused companies to fail, in my view, is that they missed the future.

Every ending is just an opportunity to start again, wiser, more experienced, and more emboldened for the next act.

when the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight. The only question is when.

New needs need new techniques.

what ever happenings life has to go on

cultural evolution; once it takes off, it goes as the ratio of those two numbers goes, at least a hundred times faster than biological evolution.

Jacob Bronowski

Without change, there can be no growth; and without growth, we stagnate and die.

It is a funny thing, how one's perspective changes.

Life ended, but politics continued.

She might not be completely at peace with the past, but rubbed along with it because it was part of who she had become.

spring will come, the soil will seed itself, that flood or drought will abate, and life goes on in that new landscape.

And she will be with children who come from a real mix of places and who have moved around a bit. They're used to it. They're all . . . well, I guess they're habituated to being different. Which means they're accustomed to finding out all the things that make them the same as one another, and yet they take their individuality in their stride.

You've got to just accept what has happened and get on with it… If you go back over every single decision that led to that moment… You'll never get better. You'll always be in that moment.

There was no bathroom—there wouldn't be a bathroom until I was almost fourteen, the same year America put a man on the moon. But we had a proper outside WC with a tall rusting iron cistern high up on the wall and a chain for the flush. There was no mains drainage and it often fell to my father to unblock the septic because the access cover for the system that served the whole street was just outside our kitchen window. Oh, those Victorian builders were a clever lot!

That's not necessarily a bad thing, is it? You bring old events and choices to the surface, and you change the vista—but spring will come, the soil will seed itself, that flood or drought will abate, and life goes on in that new landscape.

What is certain, is that war will not leave us as it found us. —WOMAN AT HOME, February 1915

I submit that style, too, is an answer to a common want; but not so much to formulated problems as to felt difficulties of an emotional kind. . . . Style is fundamentally a pose, a stance, at times a self delusion, by which the people of any period meet the particular dilemmas of their day.

Society hardly ever follows its blueprint, a fact that makes comparisons extremely difficult and judgments more than usually fallible.