Quotes About Flexibility

Do I have a long-term plan? Kind of. I have a general direction, I think. But it's funny what comes down the pike.

To me, this book is sort of like a snakeskin. A snakeskin is something you might find on the side of the road and make something out of—a belt, say, or a hatband. The snake itself heads off doing more snake stuff—getting it on with lady snakes, eating rats, making more snakeskins, et cetera.

We are intelligent not because we can do one thing particularly well, but because we can learn to do practically anything.

You can make any meal into a sandwich, and any sandwich into a meal.

The law is not so much carved in stone as it is written in water, flowing in and out with the tide.

be prepared for surprises and bad news. In fact, celebrate the bad news, because you could have received the same bad news months later, after you'd built the software.

When I feel like I'm stuck, I try to put myself back in touch with the reality of the situation. There are no rules AND I make them!

People who have strong likes and dislikes find life very difficult; they are as rigid as if they had only one bone.

The trouble with specialists is that they tend to think in grooves. From time to time something happens to shake them out of that groove.

For a long time, we have known that sometimes it serves you best simply to work around an obstacle, to make invisible what you are tired of seeing or don't understand.

how accepting children can be—must be.

True wisdom is marked by willingness to listen and a sense of knowing when to yield.

The world ain't straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there's a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn't care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain't straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don't mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.

What worked yesterday doesn't always work today.

You must learn in life to take things more lightly, my dear. The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve.

The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. .. Even in the Eternal City (Rome), says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.

The world is always changing. Learn how to allow for it. Somone makes a promise, and then they break it. A play gets good notices, and then it folds. A marriage looks strong, and then they divorce. For a while there's no war, and then there's another war. If you get too upset about it all, you become a stupid, unhappy person—and where's the good in that?

It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us.

Every try to take a toy away from a toddler? They don't like that, do they? They start kicking and screaming. Best way to take a toy away from a toddler is distract the kid, give him something else to play with. Instead of trying to forcefully take thoughts out of your mind, give your mind something better to play with.

The Silly Putty-like malleability of the institution [marriage], in fact, is the only reason we still have the thing at all. Very few people... would accept marriage on it's thirteenth-century terms. Marriage survives, in other words, precisely because it evolves. (Though I suppose this would not be a very persuasive argument to those who probably also don't believe in evolution).

Flexibility is just as essential for divinity as is discipline.

I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check.

Inevitably even the most original new ideas will eventually harden into dogma or stop working for everybody.