Quotes About Adaptation

Families came apart and regrouped, she thought. Like water. In this desert, families were the water.

I try to tell myself I must accept certain private inevitabilities. I will live a life of continual deep fatigue, for example. I will carry in me, like a poison, like a virus, rancor for most things, and while this condition will not improve, nonetheless I will learn to live with my rancor as if it were a minor irritation. There will be many achievable things that I will not do and then there will come a time when I realize they are no longer even achievable.

philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed, "The more ingenious and accurate our instruments, the more unsusceptible and inexpert become our organs: by assembling a heap of machinery about us, we find afterwards none in ourselves.

Our new ways are disruptive. They will look weird. This is good. Let us not care, but enjoy that glimpse in another's eyes that we will find sometimes—the one that says, "You're not crazy. I feel it, too.

There's that common expression that goes: Don't bring a knife to a gunfight. But a knife is better than nothing.

We don't want to be the conquistadors. We want to be Charles Darwin.

AT THAT TIME in my personal life, I was coming to grips with the end of the world. The familiar world, anyway. Many of us were. Scientists said it was ending now, philosophers said it had always been ending. Historians said there'd been dark ages before. It all came out in the wash, because eventually, if you were patient, enlightenment arrived and then a wide array of Apple devices.

You gotta be a generalist, in the new climate. But that's not enough either. If there's too much poison around. We're talking pesticides, mostly. Agrochemicals everywhere. Take the sparrows. So anyways, I'd pick raven. A raven can kill, but will he eat garbage? Yes. He will.

In the digital age, don't forget to use your digits!

Her edition, though, did make two errors, acceptable at that time: as her mother had done before her, she imposed titles on untitled poems and she standardised punctuation, not grasping how vital Dickinson's punctuation may be to the way we read her.

Sometimes, he said, the important things take time, sometimes they don't just happen all at once, sometimes answers come out of time and struggle, and learning. sometimes you just have to try again in a different way.

intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it.

Basically, it seemed to him that when it came to life, you just had to roll with it and wait to see what happened next.

Sometimes to get your life back, you have to face the death of what you thought your life would look like.

The moment you step into a landscape it becomes another one.

None of us is anyone any more. We all lost who we were. But we can all be something else, and I will be so happy to fly this rocket anywhere you suggest, even though you and Irene called it Nova Swing, which is the cheapest name I ever heard.

Another characteristic of human nature—perhaps the one that makes us most human—is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.

Throughout the whole of life one must continue to learn to live," said Seneca two millennia ago, "and what will amaze you even more, throughout life one must learn to die.

But the biggest problem of map-making is not that we have to start from scratch, but that if our maps are to be accurate we have to continually revise them.

This process of active clinging to an outmoded view of reality is the basis for much mental illness. Psychiatrists refer to it as transference.

The times have changed. To move with them I had to give it up. I do not miss it. I thought I would, but I don't.

Transference is that set of ways of perceiving and responding to the world which is developed in childhood and which is usually entirely appropriate to the childhood environment (indeed, often life-saving) but which is inappropriately transferred into the adult environment.

a pior filosofia é a do choramingas que se deita à margem do rio para o fim de lastimar o curso incessante das águas. O ofício delas é não parar nunca; acomoda-te com a lei, e trata de aproveitá-la.

O que a tornava superior e lhe dava probabilidade de triunfo, era a arte de acomodar-se às circunstâncias do momento e a toda a casta de espíritos, arte preciosa, que faz hábeis os homens e estimáveis as mulheres.