Quotes About Adaptation

Life is what it is, Alex. You just have to accept it, because you have no other choice.

Well, that's my problem, isn't it? J'ai perdu la beauté de ma culture. Je suis américaine maintentant.

El éxito o fracaso dependían en gran medida de la preparación. Con una buena preparación, lo único que se requería hacer era ejecutar. Incluso podían realizarse cambios en el ultimo momento si la planificación lo requería." ? David Baldacci , MÁXIMO IMPACTO (The Hit)

Fall was nearly here, but summer was still hanging on, dragging its heat-flamed and moisture-rich knuckles across the stark tundra.

older theories become more and more unclear when one tries to use them to obtain insight into new domains.

I'm a person who can take on the guises of people I meet. I'm a collector, and I collect personalities and ideas.

It's a compulsive need to wreck everything. You might notice there's a pattern of stripping down and building back up again throughout my life. I guess that's how some of us conduct our lives.

Tomorrow belongs to those who hear it coming.

It is a total mystery how we evolved minds capable of piloting cars through wild maneuvers using a wrist to steep while shouting at a cell phone. The creationists are fools for focusing on animal evolution. Darwin explains nature! He has more difficulty explaining us.

Even in dying, a Thennanin ship was reputed to be not worth putting out of its misery. In battle they were slow, unmaneuverable—and as hard to disable permanently as a cockroach.

new astronomy also had to adjust to the idea that what their senses told them everyday was untrue – that the world did not revolve around them alone.

Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea." "Why, as men do aland—the great ones eat up the little ones." —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE King Richard the Second

If we humans annihilate ourselves, mammalian genes are rich enough to replace us with another, maybe wiser race within a few million years. Perhaps descendants of coyotes or raccoons, creatures too adaptable ever to need refuge in arks. Too tough to be wiped out by any calamity the likes of us create.

Always, before, whenever one culture went into decline, there were others ready to take up the slack. If Rome toppled, there was light shining in Constantinople, then the Baghdad Caliphate and in China. If Philippine Spain turned repressive, Holland welcomed both refugees and science. When most of Europe went mad, in the mid–twentieth century, the brightest minds moved to America. When America grew self-indulgent and riven by new civil war, that migration sloshed and shifted East.

Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.

Growing up among cultural differences is already, or soon will be, the rule rather than the exception—even for those who never physically leave their home country.

Psychology often presents individuals as if they are frozen in time and space, describing their score on an intelligence or personality test, how they remember or what their inner conflicts are. All imply that people are fixed and that a description of them at one point in time will inevitably be true of them at another.

Necessity is a mother.

It seems to me that all our endless failures are adding up to a magnificent success. It's just not what we had in mind. It's real.

Some species are so disdainful of brains that they treat them as an expendable luxury. There are species of sea slugs that have mini-brains when they are young. They use them as they voyage through the seas looking for a perch from which they can sieve food. But once they've found their perch they no longer need such an expensive piece of equipment, so they eat their brains. Some have joked, cruelly, that this is a bit like tenured academics.

In driving for cultural change, it's a mistake to become overly constrained by your desired culture as you've defined it. Are there any other, related behaviors, values, or principles that support high performance than the ones you've formally adopted? If so, don't hesitate to push these as well.

At Honeywell, we asked business leaders to think not just about the next five years when they presented strategic plans, as they traditionally did, but also to craft the following fiscal year's plan.

When institutionalizing the culture, don't just graft it blithely onto existing processes or practices. Go deeper and question whether those processes or practices themselves need improvement.

As you pursue long-term growth, don't limit yourself to the specific initiatives discussed here. Stay alert for new growth areas.