Quotes About Adaptation

Come to think of it—what are we going to do with our old cantor? We just got a new one, you know. We needed him like a hole in the head.

It seems there's no way of making a living in this world that I haven't tried. The one thing left is matchmaking.

I don't care what I'll be in America. I just want to get there. I'm dying to see the place. I've made up my mind to learn three things there: swimming, writing, and cigar smoking. I mean I can do all three already. But I'll do them better in America.

new theories and new movements do not develop in a vacuum, they arise to spearhead the necessary social solutions to new problems resulting from contradictions in the environment.

All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.

The varying physical characteristics of the actors may also necessitate changes. Sean Connery is six feet four. Dustin Hoffman isn't.

He was like a sponge, erasing the past, soaking up the future.

Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions.

Experience teaches that for most people there is a limit beyond which their constitution cannot comply with the demands of civilization. All who wish to reach a higher standard than their constitution will allow, fall victims to neurosis. It would have been better for them if they could have remained less perfect.

we can never give up; we only exchange one thing for another

Religion interferes with this play of selection and adaptation by forcing on everyone indiscriminately its own path to the attainment of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in reducing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world by means of delusion; and this presupposes the intimidation of the intelligence.

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.

Nunca dominaremos completamente a natureza, e nosso organismo, ele mesmo parte dessa natureza, será sempre uma construção transitória, limitada em adequação e desemprenho.

no serious book can now be sure of surviving.

It would seem more appropriate not to speak of degeneration: (1) Where there are not many marked deviations from the normal; (2) where the capacity for working and living do not in general appear markedly impaired

Thus we may perhaps be forced to become reconciled to the idea that it is quite impossible to adjust the claims of the sexual instinct to the demands of civilization; that in consequence of its cultural development renunciation and suffering, as well as the danger of extinction in the remotest future, cannot be avoided by the human race.

He is convinced--and what immigrant isn't?--that all Americans are crazy.

Cole hopes to go around the world one day. One of his favorite words is explorer. During the pandemic people weren't allowed to travel anywhere unless they absolutely had to, and even now it's not the way it was before. There aren't as many airplanes. There aren't as many buses or trains, and there aren't as many cars on the highways.

There is an animal in all of us who knows how to survive.

I tend not to look back. What's done is done, good, bad or indifferent. I'm much more concerned with whatever's coming next.

We are all making it up as we go along, unmaking our minds and remaking ourselves.

Agora, Cato preferira regressar às casernas depois da instrução. Era imprescindível fazer amigos quanto antes, pensou. Mas como? E quem? Os outros tinham constituído pequenos grupos durante a viagem desde Avêntico, enquanto ele passara o tempo a ler o maldito Virgílio, recordou com súbita fúria. Dava tudo para voltar a iniciar aquela viagem, sabendo o que sabia agora.

necessity is the mother of invention, then

The world brings itself into being before my eyes in an everlasting present: I grow used to its different aspects so quickly that it does not seem to me to change.