Quotes About Adaptation

it would be possible to become a Stone Age native. For over 30 years, I programmed and conditioned myself to this end. In the last 10 of it, I would say I realistically experienced the physical, mental, and emotional reality of the Stone Age. But to borrow a Buddhist phrase, eventually came a setting face-to-face with pure reality. I learned that it is not possible for human beings as we know them to live off the land.

Every minute you remain at this altitude and above," he cautioned, "your minds and bodies are deteriorating." Brain cells were dying. Our blood was growing dangerously thick and sludgelike.

Once, when a Republican congressman from Massachusetts accused Lincoln of having changed his mind, Lincoln replied, "Yes, I have; and I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.

I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions Ã¢â'¬Â¦ but I know also that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. He

it's shrewd to put new words to an old tune, especially if you're trying to turn the familiar on its head.

in hand with the progress of the human mind.… We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

One plays by the conventions of politics in order to be in power when the hour calls for unconventional decisions.

So much of music builds on prior ideas and themes

Instead of modifying their beliefs, institutions, politics, and property systems to fit their environment, humans enter habitats and alter them to suit their cultures.

I had once thought strength of character was a hardening of oneself; an intricate protection system by which you reconciled yourself to the truths of life and learned to let them not bother you. But all systems of character building go right out the window when you find there aren't anymore truths.. or none you recognize.

The tragedy of being old is you can no longer apply what has taken you so long to learn.

I think we love differently every day. Like the guy who said you can't stand in a river at exactly the same place twice. Today I love you differently than yesterday, or will tomorrow.

You're right, Margaret, absolutely right. Things have changed a lot, even since I've been here. It's a different place now. Better in some ways, worse in others. Better! she echoed, scornfully.

According to de Gaulle's account, Blum assured him of his interest in the soldier's ideas. 'But you fought against them,' his visitor observed. 'One changes one's point of view when one becomes head of the government,' came the reply.

Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

Everyone thinks they have strict limits," she said, "until they cross them.

It was heartbreaking to see old Ossis trying to ape the thinking of Wessis, trying to master the lingo of capitalist self-promotion.

It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.

Filtering isn't phoniness—it's civilization.

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship.

Her problem at Renewable Solutions was that she could never quite figure out what she was selling, even when she was finding people to buy it, and no sooner had she finally begun to figure it out than she was asked to sell something else.

But what do we expect will become of students, successfully cocooned from uncomfortable feelings, once they leave the sanctuary of academe for the boorish badlands of real life?

Life hasn't signed a contract with you promising to give you everything you want. It just unfolds in its own mysterious and uncontrollable way. The more you stop resisting the way things are, the happier and more peaceful you'll be.

Reality is constantly changing; as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, you can't step into the same river twice.