Quotes About Adaptation

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

It was like giving a glass of brandy neat to someone who had never been weaned from a milk diet.

It is not often that a man can make opportunities for himself. But he can put himself in such shape that when or if the opportunities come he is ready to take advantage of them.

It is true, as the champions of the extremists say, that there can be no life without change, and that to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life. It is no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and retrogression instead of development.

Living in the past is a dull and lonely business looking back strains the neck muscles, causes you to bump into people not going your way.

Things used to be plain and simple; you did a thing and you knew how it would turn out. But not now. The world was changing.

Guess I'll weep awhile. Guess I won't, I mean.

Perfecting oneself is as much unlearning as it is learning.

Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.

Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.

Water, water, water... There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount...unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

Hard times are a-coming, and people without useful, practical skills are going to suffer. Or suffer most.

Civilization flows; culture thickens and coagulates, like tired, sick, stifled blood.

We'll work it out as we go along. Let our practice form our doctrine, thus assuring precise theoretical

We'll work it out as we go along. Let our practice form our doctrine, thus assuring precise theoretical coherence.

Outnumbered, surrounded and overwhelmed, the Navajos will probably be forced in self-defense to malform themselves into the shape required by industrial econometrics. Red-skinned black men at present, they must learn to become dark-brown white men with credit cards and crew-cut sensibilities.

a bee in a cactus bloom will not be provoked; it stays until the flower wilts. Until closing time.

They won't break me. I've got a nimble and pliant will, and the powers of a chameleon. I'll conform for a year, or two years if necessary, and when I get out I'll be a wiser man. Maybe a sadder man. Possibly bitter, too—I hope not.

When people can't abide things as they are, when they can't abide the present, they do one of two things ... either they ... either they turn to a contemplation of the past ... or they set about to ... alter the future. And when you want to change something ... YOU BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

Progress is a set of assumptions.

Time passes. You're not as ... recognizable now as you were.

I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

the path to change is not through greater willpower and harder work, but rather through thinking differently.