Quotes About Adaptation

We have senses we don't know we have—until we lose them; balance is one that normally works so well, so seamlessly, that it is not listed among the five that Aristotle described and was overlooked for centuries afterward.

But brain maps for the fingers, often used in precise ways, are huge.

Posit Science,

learned nonuse,

One can always trust to time. Insert a wedge of time and nearly everything straightens itself out.

Bouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes.

part three, "Transformation." In closing, please reconsider the words of Hans Selye, the father of stress research, whom I quote also at the top of this chapter: It is not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.

If the only constant is change then design is going to go on for as long as human beings inhabit the planet, and beyond the planet

Before the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe had things their own way. They had won in Spain, in Poland, in Belgium, in France. Over Britain, for the first time, they came up against something they couldn't beat. It was not easy for them to understand that.

Beyond this, it is quite probable that if the models predicting serious global warming are even approximately correct, we have already crossed a threshold in terms of the greenhouse gases thus far pumped into the atmosphere. Significant global warming might be inevitable, therefore, irrespective of whatever emission-reducing measures we now take. It follows that novel technologies and economic arrangements will have to be put in place to adjust to a wide array of consequences.

As Gregg Easterbrook points out, "Many environmentalists consider the mere mention of adaptation Ito climate change) heretical because it implies that humanity can overcome global warming rather than be overcome by it, thus shifting the emphasis away from green guilt."37

Y}ou make do with what you're given, and I've spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It's the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own.

Many of us would probably be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect

A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist.

Change yourself and your work will seem different.

We've all heard that we have to learn from our mistakes, but I think it's more important to learn from successes. If you learn only from your mistakes, you are inclined to learn only errors.

If you want things to be different, perhaps the answer is to become different yourself.

We totter now on a precipice, the ground shaking beneath us. Yet most of us still imagine that the future will resemble the past. That's a whopping mistake. New warning signs look clear and compelling.

Blaming crashes and recessions on random and unpredictable shocks beyond our control has led experts and policy makers to view subsequent crises through the wrong lens. There are random and unpredictable shocks in life, but that doesn't mean we can't face them honestly and prepare for a world in which we know they happen even if we don't know when.

I show that I have understood a writer only when I can act in his spirit, when, without constricting his individuality, I can translate him and change him in diverse ways.

Through incompleteness one becomes susceptible to other influences, and to assimilate those strange influences is the aim.

Through incompleteness one becomes susceptible to other influences, and to assimilate those strange influences if the aim.

i usedta live in the world then i moved to HARLEM & my universe is now six blocks

Exiles, she and Leroy. They didn't need to go to Paris; that would do no good. What's the point of being spat on in France? What could they do in Rio, where black people are a mythological presence? No, the frontiers in Leroy's destiny were the sounds he heard and gave back as music; for Cypress the terrain of the new world was art. Her dance, like her people before her, adapted to the contours of her new land.