Quotes About Adaptation

Sometimes, to be yourself you will have to forget yourself and become something else. Your character is not a fixed thing. You will sometimes have to move to keep up with it.

It is easier to learn to be soaked and happy than to learn how to stop the rain.

Sometimes things are a change for the better and the worse at the same time, like the internet. Or the electric keyboard. Or pre-chopped garlic. Or the theory of relativity.

And yet, when everything is alien the alien becomes familiar.

The longer you live, the more you realize that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realize their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their world views challenged and disproved. Everyone would realize the thing that defines a human being is being a human.

Technology won't save humankind. Humans will.

once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about. —Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try

Maybe instead of worrying about upgrading technology and slowly allowing ourselves to be cyborgs we should have a little peek at how we could upgrade our ability to cope with all this change.

Don't worry about things you can't control.

Remember that the key thing about life on earth is change. Cars rust. Paper yellows. Technology dates. Caterpillars become butterflies. Nights morph into days. Depression lifts.

And by noticing how modern life makes us feel, by allowing that reality and by being broad-minded enough to change when change is healthy, we can engage with this beautiful world without being worried it will steal who we are.

If you live long enough you realise that every proven fact is later disproved and then proven again.

Peut-être qu'au lieu de nous occuper d'améliorer notre technologie et de lentement nous transformer en cyborgs nous devrions nous demander comment améliorer notre capacité à gérer tous ces changements

The hardiest plant in the world is the purple saxifrage. It has delicate-looking flowers, with purple petals that seem as though they might blow away in the wind, yet it thrives in the Arctic. The flowers survive by clustering together, low to the ground, offering each other shelter against the hardest conditions on earth.

Sometimes change is for the better, and sometimes change isn't for the better.

Just as dogs were thwarted wolves, parks were thwarted forests. Humans loved both, possibly because humans were, well, thwarted.

You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try . . .

it isn't healthy to walk around no longer familiar streets, looking for memories that have been paved over

the thing that was depressing me was that humans weren't turtles. Turtles have been around for two hundred and twenty million years. Since the Triassic period. And they haven't really changed that much. Humans, in contrast, have been around only a short while. And you don't have to be a genius to switch on the news and conclude: we probably don't have long. The

Everything passes—joy follows pain, warmth melts the ice

Back in Mother Ivy's time I would have been obliged to cook you gingerbread and show you my spickle dancing, and yet now I have permission to chop you up into little pieces. I cry myself to sleep every night, and feel dead inside, but society is definitely improving.

Minds can't see what they can't handle. It's like how humans never see the second hand of a clock mid-tick.

Everything gets smaller over time. Computers, phones, apples, knives, souls.