Quotes About Adaptation

Heredity and environment are funny things. You can't rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle.

You can't hold onto the past. No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now.

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

His eyes took on a different color. It was a subtle shift, a flex, like a man stepping out from the shade of a tree into sunlight on a cloudy day.

And if we start using Celsius in the next few years, I will be severely disappointed.

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. - Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

His hair in falling seemed to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new locality, for his beard hung down to his waist.

The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells too, by Jove!—breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated.

The girl he had come across, of whom he had possessed himself, to whose presence he was not yet accustomed, with whom he did not yet know how to live; that human being so near and still so strange, gave him a greater sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life.

Men who come out here should have no entrails.

Anything—anything can be done in this country. That's what I say; nobody here, you understand, here, can endanger your position. And why? You stand the climate — you outlast them all.

It looked like a high-handed proceeding; but it was really a case of legitimate self-defense. You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.

I might just as well have ordered a tree not to sway in the wind.

Thus in the course of years he was known successively in Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia—and in each of these halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk.

He was different; innocent of heart, and full of good will, which nobody wanted, this castaway, that, like a man transplanted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future.

breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated.

Is any man so foolish as to fear change, to which all things that once were not owe their being?

As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large. After having formed this determination and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began.

he takes things as he finds them, and makes enjoyment of them somehow or other

You know what's wrong with the world today, bro? The computers. They're ruining the human race." "Computers?" "You ever see elks mate?" Russell said.

Nothing we have, no one in our lives, no state of mind is exempt from change.

What do you do when it rains? The captain answered frankly. I get wet.

mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.

I suppose it is just about impossible for someone like me to rebel anymore and produce any kind of lasting effect. I have lost the power to upset things that I had as a child; I can no longer change my environment or even disturb it seriously.