Quotes About Adaptation

When a new thing or a new idea comes into the consciousness of the community, it is described, not by a new word, but by the name of the pre-existing object which most closely resembles it.

Evidence not of imperial glory, but of complete cultural failure and betrayal by men who insisted on importing their environment with them, rather than adapting to a new one in which they found themselves struggling to survive.

Perfection is immutable. But for things imperfect, change is the way to perfect them.

Freedom of speech and association; due process; habeas corpus; the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement; even the prohibitions on torture and extrajudicial killings—the law governing these constitutional principles looks vastly different in 2015 than it did in the summer of 2001.

I'd always admired The Beatles for starting out as a bubblegum pop group and then getting heavier and heavier as their albums went on, and here was me going in the opposite direction.

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

All change is bad. But sometimes it has to be done.

You don't despair about something like the Middle East, you just do the best you can.

As she had learned these past few years, things changed—life, people, animals—all without your permission, no matter how zealously you fought to maintain supreme control.

They take a match and light it, and then puff away. "We will learn to smoke; do you like it Johnny?" That lad dolefully replies: "Not very much; it tastes bitter;" by and by he grows pale, but he persists and he soon offers up a sacrifice on the altar of fashion; but the boys stick to it and persevere until at last they conquer their natural appetites and become the victims of acquired tastes. I speak "by the book," for I have noticed its effects on myself

Vendrán de París las modas y los libros; los pasteles de Hungría, la ilustración de Viena; peluqueros a bandadas, cocineros en montón. Se ordenará que los chicos se olviden del español, y que las beatas recen en la lengua de Voltaire, pero sólo la lengua, no la lectura, porque esa seguirá siendo perniciosa.

Los libros se hacen con lo que se tiene y no necesariamente con lo que se quiere.

Like many immigrants, I had always kept my Eastern and Western lives compartmentalized.

I always thought that what Rajima did with those cast-off peels was a metaphor for how she dealt with her arranged marriage. She transformed those peels, with palm sugar for sweetness and tamarind for tang, into something precious.

She had sculpted the mist, the way those who have no choice do. She had willed a life for the two of us in a new land.

You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Krakow the city of Kings, was no longer mine. I had become a foreigner in the place i had always called home

makes even the most difficult of times better and the strangest of villages home.

Love never goes away; it just changes form.

Look at things the way they are and not the way you wish they was and you'll get along all right.

Accepting the world's realities, even when you didn't understand them, was a basic necessity of existence in Ozark life.

Most of us fear that in growing old, we'll become a shell of ourselves. But, of course, it's the youthful versions of ourselves that are our shells; we must leave them behind like a snakeskin. We must grow out of ourselves to grow beyond our old limits, or else risk being suffocated by the sediment of our own history.

A sudden change in plans will lead to good fortune.

equally eagerly from the nineteenth-century polymath Herbert Spencer, the first truly global thinker – who, after reading Darwin, coined the term 'survival of the fittest'. Hitler revered Atatürk (literally, 'the father of the Turks') as his guru; Lenin and Gramsci were keen on Taylorism, or 'Americanism'; American New Dealers later adapted Mussolini's 'corporatism'.