Quotes about Adaptation

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

Everything teaches transition, transference, metamorphosis: therein is human power, in transference, not in creation; & therein is human destiny, not in longevity but in removal. We dive & reappear in new places.

Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use...In God, every end is converted into a new means.

A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engrafted with a foreign stock.

We are like travelers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs.

Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these the fruit of his character.

As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its owns books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.

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

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.

There are two kinds of pain: the pain of change and the pain of never changing and remaining the same.

Leaders are not born; I believe they are made.