Quotes About Adaptation

It's just amazing how hard it is for people to change, even when amazing things happen. It almost reinforces who you are instead of making you change.

Failure is an amazing data point that tells you which direction not to go.

Rather than allowing our response to an even affect our breathing, we can learn instead to let our breathing change our relationship to the event.

The river's injury is its shape.

But he learned what he had to, and he changed, and so he made himself exceptional.

We live the given life, and not the planned. - 1994 III

Of course, what I wasn't telling myself, and maybe was trying not to know (though I did know), was that at Squire's Landing, and Goforth too, things were already changed. The things I was remembering were gone from everywhere except my mind.

I was changed by Nathan's death, because I had to be. Our life together here was over. It was my life alone that had to go on. The strand had slackened. I had begun the half-a-life you have when you have a whole life that you can only remember.

And when we finally gathered ourselves together again among the ruins, we were changed.

Well, sir," Athey said, "where I used to be limber I'm stiff and where I used to be stiff I'm limber. Do you know what I'm talking about?

It was as though I knew without exactly knowing, or felt, or smelled in the air, the already accomplished fact that nothing would ever be simple for me again. I never again would be able to put my life in a box and carry it away.

If nothing ever changed, there would be no such things as butterflies.

I do realize how this all sounds. I realize that in this account of my journey to the Little House on the Prairie, a journey that in Pa's time would have taken at least ten days, my litany of misfortunes contains words like power windows and Wi-Fi. I realize, yes, that one of the greatest hardships I had to contend with involved a car that starts with the push of a button.

The lessons he learned were diligently applied to modify his methods, resulting in a continuous research loop

Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values.

What's really bad is that after acknowledging a wrong decision, I don't have the nerve to turn back, since I'd rather correct myself with another wrong decision.

That is the true challenge--to work within a narrow confine. To accept what you cannot have; that from which you cannot deviate.

Successful system builders cannot work with a rigid demarcation between the system and the environment in which the system develops. They continuously seek to mold that environment so that the growth of the system is facilitated, often incorporating what was previously environment into the system, as happened when electrical supply companies came to control the regulative agencies set up to police them.

Every human institution (Justice included) will stretch a little, if only you pull it in the right way.

The ruling idea of his life appeared to be, that he was bound to show his gratitude to the country which had afforded him an asylum and a means of subsistence by doing his utmost to turn himself into an Englishman.

In my ordinary evening costume I took up the room of three men at least. In my present dress, when it was held close about me, no man could have passed through the narrowest spaces more easily than I.

Collins wrote a dramatic version of The Woman in White that made its London debut at the Olympic Theatre on October 9, 1871. It ran on Broadway for three weeks in 1873.

The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. In the competition for food or mates or power some organisms succeed and some fail. In the struggle for existence some individuals are better equipped than others to meet the tests of survival.

Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice.