Quotes About Adaptation

Look and see which way the wind blows before you commit yourself.

Keep your place in life and your place will keep you

I thought these grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.

It is wise to turn circumstances to good account.

He that is discontented in one place will seldom be happy in another.

A very large Oak was uprooted by the wind, and thrown across a stream. It fell among some Reeds, which it thus addressed: I wonder how you, who are so light and weak, are not entirely crushed by these strong winds. They replied: You fight and contend with the wind, and consequently you are destroyed; while we, on the contrary, bend before the least breath of air, and therefore remain unbroken. Stoop to conquer.

But things move on and by the time you've plotted your position the world around you has changed and you are running -panting- to catch up.

Dad lost his job. Then he got a new job. Then he got his old job back and went back to it. They were all in the same building.

If it isn't good, let it die. If it doesn't die, make it good.

The written Constitution cannot work as intended without something outside of it—America's unwritten Constitution—to fill in its gaps and to stabilize it. In

it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place where we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there." (p.23)

Growth occurs when we discover how to remain authentically ourselves in the presence of potentially threatening things. Maturity is the possession of coping skills: we can take in our stride things that previously would have knocked us off course. We are less fragile, less easily shocked and hence more capable of engaging with situations as they really are

Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.

It seemed an advantage to be travelling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by whom we are with, we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.

Neither does philosophy deny the utility of certain kinds of anxiety. After all, as successful insomniacs have long suggested, it may be the anxious who survive best in the world.

It is when we find points of connection to the foreign that we are able to grow.

We seem divided between an urge to override our senses and numb ourselves to our settings and a contradictory impulse to acknowledge the extent to which our identities are indelibly connected to, and will shift along with, our locations.

Alice loved in order to make up for her own insufficiencies, she searched in others for qualities she aspired to, respected but lacked. Her emotional needs were like a puzzle incomplete without a segment brought by another but the dimensions of the void altered in response to self-development, the piece which fitted at fifteen would no longer fit at thirty. The gap redrew its contours, and unless the puzzle-person kept up she would be left to divorce or awkwardly force the issue.

see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the beauty of the landscape is broken up by these, for they are not yet consecrated in their reading. But the true poet sees them fall within the great order of nature not less than the beehive or the spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own'.

In the old days he would have taken to the block. Now he was taken to New Zealand and given the role of high commissioner. It was the block, but it took longer.

Once upon a time I had my life planned out...

Carve the peg by looking at the hole.' Eddie looked at me blankly and I explained, 'An old Korean saying. It means, Do things to fit the circumstances.

What was, was. What is, is. Be true to what is, rather than clinging to an old form. Then you will create new meaningful relationships that match who you are and what you want.

Forced change is not true change;