Quotes About Adaptation

Life does just go on, and you change, and you can't go back. You have to live it the way it comes.

You had better make up your mind to accept what you cannot alter. You can live a beautiful life in the midst of your present circumstances.

My father was a soldier and my mother was a great mover. She once counted up how many places she had lived in during the first 25 years of her marriage and it came to 20.

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

What a child knows about transformation is very little. What an adult knows, I think, is even less. Because a child at least remembers that transformation is possible.

No, normalcy is taken for granted until it's gone.

WE WERE NEVER BORN TO READ. HUMAN BEINGS invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species.

There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain's protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way.

Can an individual reader consciously acquire various circuits, much like bilingual speakers who read different scripts?

This morning, when I got my mail there's concrete all over the ground cement, you know and these little clovers the little green clovers, like from St. Patrick's Day the plant were growing up out of the cement no dirt and no nothing and no rain and there they were, growing up out of the cement, and I was thinking "that's like me."

Too many people fail to answer opportunity's knock at the door because they have to finish some preconceived plan.

Within reason" is not the sort of place one can easily find on a map; in fact, its location may vary considerably from one day to the next.

Squirrels no!

Culture and tradition have to change little by little. So 'new' means a little twist, a marriage of Japanese technique with French ingredients. My technique. Indian food, Korean food I put Italian mozzarella cheese with sashimi. I don't think 'new new new.' I'm not a genius. A little twist.

I've been making sushi for 38 years, and I'm still learning. You have to consider the size and color of the ingredients, how much salt and vinegar to use and how the seasons affect the fattiness of the fish.

The principle is not that you change when your surroundings change, but that your surroundings change when you change.

Of course, we all know that water is transparent and has no taste, smell, or color. What's amazing about water is that it is able to show us myriad "faces" depending upon the condition it is in or the information it is given.

Some studies actually showed that that Russian drinkers lived longer than non-drinkers. [Michelle Parsons] suggested an explanation for the apparent vodka paradox: for what it is worth, alcohol may help people adapt to realities that otherwise make them want to curl up and die. Parsons, who called her book "Dying Unneeded", argued that Russians were dying early because they had nothing and no one to live for.

If you call failures experiments, you can put them in your resume and claim them as achievements.

The sewing machine joins what the scissors have cut asunder, plus whatever else comes in its path.

Seneca actually explicitly says in his thirty-third letter to his friend Lucilius: Will I not walk in the footsteps of my predecessors? I will indeed use the ancient road—but if I find another route that is more direct and has fewer ups and downs, I will stake out that one. Those who advanced these doctrines before us are not our masters but our guides. The truth lies open to all; it has not yet been taken over. Much is left also for those yet to come.

Massimo Pigliucci

One of the key tenets of Stoicism is that we ought to recognize, and take seriously, the difference between what we can and cannot master.

What should we do then? Make the best use of what is in our power, and treat the rest in accordance with its nature." Epictetus, Discourses I, 1.17