Quotes About Adaptation

If you've told a child a thousand times and he still doesn't understand, then it is not the child who is a slow learner.

A political country is like an American forest; you have only to cut down the old trees, and immediately new trees come up to replace them.

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

A]n ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered.

Overtime my writing style has evolved in part because I try to do something different with each book.

Torn from its branch, the moon waned for a couple of weeks.

On the breakup of Harrison Ford's first marriage It wasn't because he became a star. In all relationships there are changes and the point is both partners have to change together.

Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

This is the old way of thinking, and most people think first as they have been taught to think; and next, as they see others think.

Two movements in human life are important: (a) deep reluctance to let loose of a world that has passed away, and (b) capacity to embrace a new world being given.

Because if you cling excessively to the past, you will miss the newness being enacted before your very eyes.

Observance of the freedom God has to change causes a terrible unsettling among the faithful.

Yeah, that's funny, huh?...Something hurts you real bad and you get used to it. Like being hurt becomes part of who you are.

It's easier to change what you do than people think it is. If you don't change, your field changes around you.

Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Out job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them.

Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.

you think the two of us have changed enough to make it interesting again?" Bitsy put her paw on the pavement. "Sometimes," she said, "I'm immensely grateful that I don't possess a limbic system.

We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn't a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn't move in a strange direction. We don't know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn't made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment faster than we can change ourselves.

For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.

They are an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We

Wenn schlechte Dinge zur Gewohnheit werden, muss man die Verhältnisse ändern.

Mein Freund erkannte tatsächlich, daß es so nicht weiterging, wenn er nicht in einer Zwangsjacke enden wollte. Er sah ein, daß er sich mehr den weltlichen Dingen zuwenden mußte. Also verließ er seine Wahngebäude, ließ sie zu wunderschönen Ruinen verfallen, die er nur noch selten aufsuchte. Und er konzentrierte sich nun auf das, was ihn umgab.

The Aztecs invented the wheel, but didn't know how to use it except as a children's toy. Even though they built roads that to us scream out to have a wheel put on them, nonetheless they continued to drag things around. The society itself was blind to the possibilities.