Quotes About Adaptation

Remembering this has a survival

Davidson had become a strong believer in the concept of neuroplasticity, the idea that people's brains will physically change over time and that those changes can depend on their life experiences.

For my whole career in retail, I have stuck by one guiding principle. It's a simple one, and I have repeated it over and over and over in this book until I'm sure you're sick to death of it. But I'm going to say it again anyway: the secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want.

If American business is going to prevail, and be competitive, we're going to have to get accustomed to the idea that business conditions change, and that survivors have to adapt to those changing conditions. Business is a competitive endeavor, and job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.

The day you stop learning and creating must be the most boring day.

Those cuts on my ribs are because I am trying to open gills before the flood comes.

After only a week on the road, I am changed. It's hard for me to stay too long at a diner or coffee shop. I hear so much now. The air conditioners, dishwashers, coffee machines, and restroom hand dryers rage like an angry electric army.

El said that kids today never sit still long enough to see how the river changes. What, she wondered, was going to happen to people who think they know everything? What's going to happen without chance? Good question.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously described the importance of being able "to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time," while still retaining "the ability to function." I was quickly becoming practiced at this discomfiting balance.

A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won't sit on a cold stove either.

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.

Nothing will ever die so long as it knows what to do under the circumstances, in other words so long as it knows its business.

Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy—very unhappy—it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.

We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble--no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape.

All our lives long, every day and every hour, we are engaged in the process of accommodating our changed and unchanged selves to changed and unchanged surroundings: living, in fact, is nothing else than this process of accommodation; when we fail in it a little we are stupid, when flagrantly we are mad, when we give up the attempt altogether we die, when we suspend it temporarily we sleep.

Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another.

An idea must not be condemned for being a little shy and incoherent; all new ideas are shy when introduced first among our old ones. We should have patience and see whether the incoherency is likely to wear off or to wear on, in which latter case the sooner we get rid of them the better.

There are, in every age, new errors to be rectified and new prejudices to be opposed.

New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.