Quotes About Adaptation

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.

As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its owns books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

For everything you have missed you have gained something else, and for everything you gain you lose something else.

I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers.

For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something.

nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.

Going on the offense is no longer optional, for one simple reason: defense alone means a shrinking business.

No matter how successful it has made you, your past experience won't ensure success in this new world.

In our relationships, how much can we allow them to become new, and how much do we cling to what they used to be yesterday?

If somebody at work is a problem for you, they're not the one who needs to change. If someone is a problem for you, it's you who needs to change. If you feel they're causing you trouble, that's your problem. It's on you. Your job is to clear yourself.

What often happens when we face this stripping away of our models is that we will give up this and that, and instead grab onto that and this. It's too uncomfortable not to have anything to cling to, and so we substitute a new set of attachments for the old ones.

The caterpillar does not become a flying caterpillar; it morphs into a butterfly.

a mere five years after the last maharaja had signed away his land, Indians had 'come to take integrated India so much for granted that it requires amental effort today even to imagine that it could be different'.

For most of human history, we appear to have lived in tribes of seventy-five to 150 people. Those who could not handle the complexity of the relationships would go off on their own. Lions need to eat, after all. Today

When I returned to India for the first time after years of being gone, I wondered why I remembered those small rooms as being quite large. Was it because I didn't know any better? When Charles Dickens returned to his hometown and remarked that his city had changed, someone responded that it had not changed nearly as much as he had.

the transitory feeling of being constantly uprooted was always present.

It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now.

Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day.

Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. We'll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time... -Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.

Man had become too much man and not enough animal

If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that's long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we've stashed away. But there are times when we're all autumn people.