Quotes About Adaptation

Noisy aspens and remnant birches, forests of cottonwoods and poplars, take up the chorus: The world is turning into a new thing.

couldn't imagine Robin toughening up enough to survive this Ponzi scheme of a planet.

A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again.

Mysteriously, almost unaccountably, my family had ended up in the trees, sort of like the Swiss Family Robinson.

In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species

A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out

A virus does not "want" to kill its host. That is not in the best interest of the virus, because then the virus may also die, unless it can jump fast enough out of the dying host into a new host.

Foodways like any other aspect of culture, are never static. Even without the influence of other cultures, we would be eating and cooking differently from the generations that came before us.

People want to think of a food tradition as something that would continue unchanging and timeless, unless some outside force knocked things askew.

For decades to come, the English would burn coal primarily for home heating. The new fuel had still to be adapted to perform useful work. Burning it at home was straightforward; adapting it to industrial production, challenging and complex. Homes needed only a hearth with a chimney. Industry needed changes in coal's very chemistry. In the meantime, increasing demand soon exhausted the superficial outcroppings of sea coal.

Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.

the ordeal of developing new selves will not be seriously entertained, much less embarked upon, until [people] are forced into it by the partial destruction of their former selves.

Horses increased in number after the commercialization of the steam engine because horsepower filled the niche below steam power. A horse stood ready to pull a cart or plow a field on command, without the delay of building up a head of steam. Energy transitions are seldom so complete that they drive out every competitor. Much of the world still relies on animals for farm work and transportation: horses, oxen, camels, llamas, water buffalo, elephants, even fellow humans.

You do not think yourself into a new way of living as much as you live your way into a new way of thinking.

A master drives you toward the substance so that you will stop defending and protecting the forms.

Carl Jung, in his Collected Works (8, 784): "We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

We don't think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking.

The God-image, the self-image, and the world-image are deeply connected. Normally, when one of them changes, the other two have to readjust. So, when our God-image changes, then we have to change. When our world-image is adjusted, we are confused or even depressed for a while.

One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. —CARL JUNG, THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE As

Francis of Assisi was a master of making room for the new and letting go of that which was tired or empty.

humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living.

One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. —CARL JUNG, THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE

In times of great change [which is always], learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists." Faith

Eric Hoffer, the street philosopher, put it this way: "In times of great change [which is always], learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.