Adaptation Quotes

“The best fighter is not a Boxer, Karate or Judo man. The best fighter is someone who can adapt on any style. He kicks too good for a Boxer, throws too good for a Karate man, and punches too good for a Judo man.”
― Bruce Lee

“My simple explanation of why we human beings, the most advanced species on earth, cannot find happiness, is this: as we evolve up the ladder of being, we find three things: the first, that the tension between the range of opposites in our lives and society widens dramatically and often painfully as we evolve; the second, that the better informed and more intelligent we are, the more humble we have to become about our ability to live meaningful lives and to change anything, even ourselves; and consequently, thirdly, that the cost of gaining the simplicity the other side of complexity can rise very steeply if we do not align ourselves and our lives well.”
― Dr Robin Lincoln Wood

“I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.”
― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“De wijze heeft geen onwrikbare beginselen. Hij past zich aan anderen aan.

(Free translation into English: The wise man has no firm principles. He adapts to others.)”
― Lao-Tse

“All canonical writing possesses the quality "of making you feel strangeness at home.”
― Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages

“Only those who are able to adapt to changing scenarios will continue to survive and prosper. Success is directly proportional to the degree of positive adaptation to change.”
― Vishwas Chavan, VishwaSutras: Universal Principles For Living: Inspired by Real-Life Experiences

“[I]t wasn't so much the mistakes that people made but how flexible they were in their aftermath that made all the difference in how their lives turned out.”
― Naomi Jackson, The Star Side of Bird Hill

“We shall best understand the probable course of natural selection by taking the case of a country undergoing some physical change, for instance, of climate. The proportional numbers of its inhabitants would almost immediately undergo a change, and some species might become extinct. We may conclude, from what we have seen of the intimate and complex manner in which the inhabitants of each country are bound together, that any change in the numerical proportions of some of the inhabitants, independently of the change of climate itself, would most seriously affect many of the others. If the country were open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this also would seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants. Let it be remembered how powerful the influence of a single introduced tree or mammal has been shown to be. But in the case of an island, or of a country partly surrounded by barriers, into which new and better adapted forms could not freely enter, we should then have places in the economy of nature which would assuredly be better filled up, if some of the original inhabitants were in some manner modified; for, had the area been open to immigration, these same places would have been seized on by intruders. In such case, every slight modification, which in the course of ages chanced to arise, and which in any way favoured the individuals of any of the species, by better adapting them to their altered conditions, would tend to be preserved; and natural selection would thus have free scope for the work of improvement.”
― Charles Darwin

“Culture is always on the move.”
― Colin Woodard, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

“The mind is not designed to grasp the laws of probability, even though the laws rule the universe.”
― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“People see a Macbeth film. They imagine they have seen Macbeth, and don't want to see it again; so when your Mr. Hackett or somebody comes round to act the play, he finds the house empty. That is what has happened to dozens of good plays whose authors have allowed them to be filmed. It shall not happen to mine if I can help it.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Authors on film

“If you accept the situation, you will find strength for strategic adaptation.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Evolution taught us that adaptation is the key to survival.”
― Gemma Malley, The Legacy

“We are always people that are in the making, constantly adapting to accommodate the roads we walk. As we learn, it changes us. As we go about our course, we grow, and prune everything around us; friends, beliefs, desires. Our past experiences plant the seeds needed for our future roads, with all its turns, speed, and treachery.”
― Kat Lahr, Nature Of Occurrences

“They did what soldiers always do. They improvised.”
― Geoffrey Norman

“There were three people in my home and I was the only one showing Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity and reactivity to the radio frequency transmitting utility meters. For these reasons I did not shield my home and took the route of adapting my body to the toxic electromagnetic environment.”
― Steven Magee, Curing Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity

“Innovators "view failure not as a fatal character flaw but as a learning experience.”
― Jason Jennings, The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change

“And since a more convincing argument could not be found—aside from a fatal accident or suicide—this way was chosen: a process of galloping senescence.”
― Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth

“لأن تقلبات الحياة تكون أقسى منك أحياناً
كن كالماء، يتشكل بحسب الإناء الذي يُسكب فيه دون أن تتغير تركيبته أو تتبدل خواصه أو يتعكر صفاؤه”
― د. نادر الملاح

“Life is ever changing. We can always adapt to the new changes.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“Old English, the heart and soul of the old regime at Oxford, ceased to be a required course only as of 2002.”
― Philip Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams

“Kiedy nie ma się nic oprócz młotka, wszystko wygląda jak gwóźdź.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“There were times he thought he might not want to live the life he saw before him. It was a life of obstacles and hardships—challenges and tests of will he could not yet predict. But he couldn’t stop. He had to endure. The path had not changed. It was he who had changed.”
― Matt K. Turner, GENESIS

“Forgive, Adapt and Evolve, because holding on stagnates your opportunity of being better.”
― Sachin Kumar Puli

“On the rare occasions on which a movie was shown, there was as much suspense in the audience over whether the electricity would hold out to the end of the film as there was in the film itself.”
― Robert A. Caro, The Path to Power

“Among the things most characteristic of organisms--most distinctive of living as opposed to inorganic systems--is a sort of directedness. Their structures and activities have an adaptedness, an evident and vital usefulness to the organism. Darwin's answer and ours is to accept the common sense view...[that] the end ("telos") [is] that the individual and the species may survive. But this end is (usually) unconscious and impersonal. Naive teleology is controverted not by ignoring the obvious existence of such ends but by providing a naturalistic, materialistic explanation of the adaptive characteristics serving them. [Book review in "Science," 1959, p. 673.]”
― George Gaylord Simpson

“I consider myself fortunate that I spent three years working at 7,775 feet before spending five years working at 13,796 feet on the summit of Mauna Kea. I can only wonder how much more severe my long term very high altitude sickness could have been without the initial adaptation to the lower altitude.”
― Steven Magee

“Cultural change works orders of magnitude faster then genetic change. Stephen Jay Gould”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

“Life is ever changing. We can always adapt to the new changes.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita