Quotes About Adaptation

No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or the vastness, the stillness, the mocking reminder of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance--and some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on, even after the rituals and conventions are learned, the geography mapped, and the natives found friendly.

Over the years, my experience, my tastes, my prejudices have changed: as the days go by, my memory keeps reshelving, cataloguing, discarding the volumes in my library, my words and my world - except for a few constant landmarks - are never one and the same. Heraclitus's bon mot about time applies equally well to my reading: "You never dip into the same book twice.

Each technology has its own merits, and therefore it may be more useful to leave aside this crusading view of the electronic word vanquishing the printed one and explore instead each technology according to its particular merits. Perhaps

Every story is a palimpsest, composed of layers of tellings and retellings, and every time we think we are parroting a well-known anecdote the words shed their feathers and sprout new ones for the occasion.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.

They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now But God doesn't change Men do though

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them… But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy.

An irrelevance, and your life's altered.

The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the current popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old habits for new and less harmful ones.

His gravest offence had been to accept the world in which he found himself as normal, rational and right.

Every species, except the human, chose immediate, short-range success by means of specialization. But specialization always leads into blind alleys. It is only by remaining precariously generalized that an organism can advance towards that rational intelligence which is its compensation for not having a body and instincts perfectly adapted to one particular kind of environment.

Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they ahd been made for man, not as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them.

The forms change, but the substance remains.

Conventions are stupid things; but even the children of the spirit must make some compromise with the world.

Five minutes later roots and fruits were abolished; the flower of the present rosily blossomed.

All crosses had their tops cut and became T's.

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions.

New ideas are reasonable if they can be fitted into an already familiar scheme, unreasonable if they cannot be made to fit. Our intellectual prejudices determine the channels along which our reason shall flow.

Life is so constituted that we can make effective use of things whose nature we do not understand.

Analizando su vida doméstica, Biran sentía que había hecho muy bien en casarse con una amable y simple mujer, capaz de ser feliz a mi lado sin reclamarme nada, y para quien soy siempre lo suficientemente bueno como para no hacer esfuerzo alguno en modificarme.

El cuerpo social persiste aunque sus células cambien.