Quotes about Adaptation

If you do not cut the moorings, God will have to break them by a storm and send you out.

You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Think of how strange the colours and sights of the world would be for a blind man abruptly made to see or a man deaf from birth hearing the playing of a hundred flutes

First develop a strategy that utilizes everything around you. The best way to prepare for a challenge is to cultivate the ability to call on an infinite variety of responses.

None of these modern adaptations is "in the Bible," and yet even the most committed "rulebook Bible" readers out there wind up adapting what the Bible says, because we have to—if we want that ancient text to continue to speak to us today.

reality isn't what it used to be.

And here is the absolutely vital and life-changing take-home point for us: ancient and ambiguous laws, in order to remain relevant, needed to be adapted—which results in the diversity of the laws we see in the Old Testament.

We perceive God, think about God, and talk about God in ways that make sense to us by virtue of when and where we live.

adapting the past to speak to changing circumstances in the present.

Without its unwavering commitment to adaptation over time, the Bible would have died a quick death over two thousand years ago. Its existence as a source of spiritual truth that transcends specific times and places is made possible by its flexibility and adaptive nature—one of the many paradoxes we need to embrace when it comes to the Bible.

Wisdom is about learning how to work through the unpredictable, uncontrollable messiness of life so you can figure things out on your own in real time.

And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” So they used brick instead of stone, and tar instead of mortar.