Quotes About Adaptation

We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.

We have to let go of our plans if we are to become the person we are meant to be.

Our time has changed, and it's changed and changed, and it continues to change so fast, that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. So the virtues of the past are the vices of today, and many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. And the moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now, and that's what it's not doing, and that's why it's ridiculous to go back to the old-time religion.

You can keep an old tradition going only by renewing it in terms of current circumstances.

We must be willing to get rid the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.

Der Engländer, der sich im Urwald von Nigeria zum Dinner umkleidet, fühlt, daß diese Handlung einen Sinn hat.

We must constantly die one way or another to the selfhood already achieved.

We can't have a mythology for a long, long time to come. Things are changing too fast to become mythologized.

Be a surfer. Watch the ocean. Figure out where the big waves are breaking and adjust accordingly.

Instead of freaking out about these constraints, embrace them. Let them guide you. Constraints drive innovation and force focus. Instead of trying to remove them, use them to your advantage.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,Through him the gale of life blew high;The tree of man was never quiet:Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.

Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.

She loved the beauty and the grace of the good old days, but not the rules that kept kids from talking and women from lifting heavy objects if they wanted to. Raleia was beginning to think it would be better to invent a whole new time period where she could pull things from then and now to make the perfect place.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change.

we shall never be what we were again'. Old love's refrain.

In nature there are few sharp lines.

Lacking a pot, Pepys "shit in the chimney" twice one night, whereas the Yorkshire laborer Abram Ingham used his "clogg" [shoe] to "make water in." If all else failed, an Italian adage instructed, "You may piss a bed, and say you sweated."38

Life rarely develops as we expect. People surprise us, sometimes in unpleasant ways. They don't always react as we hope they will or want them to.

America didn't bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.

America's genius has always been to take something old, familiar and wrinkled and repackage it as new, exciting and smooth.

When you're a visitor to a city, you like to hurry up the habits, lay down a pattern, gain predictability in place of roots.

It is in Europe that we are born and bred to a single role. America is populated by second acts, encores and revivals.

I don't see much sense in that," said Rabbit. "No," said Pooh humbly, "there isn't. But there was going to be when I began it. It's just that something happened to it along the way.

Now then, Pooh," said Christopher Robin, "where's your boat?" "I ought to say," explained Pooh as they walked down to the shore of the island, "that it isn't just an ordinary sort of boat. Sometimes it's a Boat, and sometimes it's more of an Accident. It all depends." "Depends on what?" "On whether I'm on the top of it or underneath it.