Quotes About Adaptation

Look at the matter in this way. Since we can see that a dog is fitted by nature to do one thing, and a horse to do another, and a nightingale, if you like, to do yet another, it wouldn't be absurd for one to declare overall that each of them is beautiful precisely in so far as it best fulfils its own nature; and since each is different in nature, it would seem to me that each of them is beautiful in a different way. Isn't that so? The student agreed.

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and rais'd in Ocean's pearly caves First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin, and feet and wing.

Till o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm, Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form: Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame, And soars and shines, another and the same.

Our lives are not good—it is not the Afghanistan we remember—but it is still life.

The tide of change rose and then receded, but it left behind an altered landscape.

people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

in the shaping of a life, chance and the ability to respond to chance are everything.

Most often in history it was the conquerors who learned willingly from the conquered.

In times of change the learners will inherit the earth, while the knowers will find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo.

We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.

It is well for those who hug the present and want to preserve it as it is not to play with mass movements. For it always fares ill with the present when a genuine mass movement is on the march.

Quando gli uomini si trovano di fronte a qualcosa di nuovo che li coglie impreparati, si affannano a cercare le parole per dare un nome all'ignoto, anche quando non possono definirlo né comprenderlo.

we shed the skins of who we used to be!

We're all living contradictions, trying to survive in a world filled with hypocrites

Sometimes you have to let people change and grow on their own, you have to back off and hope it turns out for the best.

We were making some progress on climate-change adaptation in the late 1990s," Klaus Jacob observed. "But September 11th set us back a decade on extreme-weather hazards, because we started focusing on a completely different set of threats.

It's a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what's changed, is you.

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

In a future that includes competition from open source, we can expect that the eventual destiny of any software technology will be to either die or become part of the open infrastructure itself.

Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.

One of the many consequences of the exponential power-versus-time curve in computing, and the corresponding pace of software development, is that 50% of what one knows becomes obsolete over every 18 months.