Quotes About Adaptation

We always interfere with nature. I think if tennis players continue to wear headbands they will end up killing off eyebrows, as they're there to catch sweat.

There's non-stop movie work for dwarves these days if they want it. I think it's because a lot of people are watching movies on iPads – they fit on the screen better.

but one cannot look backward, only forward. What has passed has passed forever.

You can step in the same river but the water will always be new.

Sometimes I would like to cry. I close my eyes. Why weren't we designed so that we can close our ears as well? (Perhaps because we would never open them.) Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?

you walk into a room and your life ends but you keep on living.

I wanted her for what she was, but when I got her I wanted her to change.

Jackson had never really seen the point of existential angst. If you didn't like something you changed it and if you couldn't change it you sucked it up and soldiered on, one foot after the other. ("Remind me not to come to you for therapy," Julia said.)

how strange it was that people just kept on going, even when their world no longer existed.

The man who has lost his purse will go wherever you wish. [Lat., Ibit eo quo vis qui zonam perdidit.]

That series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution -- not biological, but cultural evolution . . . "The Ascent of Man.

I don't look like a leading man, whatever they look like. It's changing a little.

Some men tend to cling to old intellectual excitements, just as some belles, when they are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth.

The fuel in the earth will be exhausted in a thousand or more years, and its mineral wealth, but man will find substitutes for these in the winds, the waves, the sun's heat, and so forth.

Nature, by its very nature, is very brutal and unequal. However, Man has somehow managed to transform the nature of its brutality and inequality.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man

I am not nearly so interested in what monkey man was derived from as I am in what kind of monkey he is to become.

A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe, but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.

It now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one...the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

Being abroad makes you conscious of the whole imitative side of human behavior. The ape in man.

Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis - once that crisis can be recognized and understood.

An occasional lucky guess as to what makes a wife tick is the best a man can hope for, Even then, no sooner has he learned how to cope with the tick than she tocks.

The swallow is not ensnared by men because of its gentle nature. [Lat., At caret insidiis hominum, quia mitis, hirundo.]

Men don't live well by themselves. They don't even live like people. They live like bears with furniture.