Quotes About Flexibility

It's like I'm figuring it out, but as soon as I do, something shifts, and we get to figure it out all over again. I resist this endless figuring it all out, but over time, it starts to work a kind of magic on me.

Specialization is for insects

English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language -- this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible -- despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it.

His was not a small mind bothered by logic and consistency.

But, whatever you do, do not let the past be a straitjacket!

But their refuge had been a dead end; all that inflexible old guard could do was to die and let younger minds, still limber, take over.

English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it. Nobody tried to stop this process, the way some languages are policed and have official limits . . . probably because there never has been, truly, such a thing as 'the King's English'—for 'the King's English' was French. English was in truth a bastard tongue and nobody cared how it grew . . . and it did!—enormously.

Freedom is a hard habit to break.

That's the beauty about this business. You don't have to know anything; you just have to know where to find out.

Daddy says that, in a dilemma, it is helpful to change any variable, then reexamine the problem.

Don't anybody mention ice skating; Grandmaw is too old and frail and it wouldn't be polite. Hilda, you suggest dominoes and we'll all chime in—Grandmaw likes dominoes. We'll go skating some other time. Okay, kids?" Jubal

Don't bang your head against a stone wall." He might add: "Climb over, go around, tunnel under, knock a hole in it—and if nothing works, forget it! Change your plans. Or take a nap. But don't get ulcers.

To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.

If a table has four legs, which one can you afford to throw away?

But once you have a belief system everything that comes in either gets ignored if it doesn't fit the belief system or get distorted enough so that it can fit into the belief system. You gotta be continually revising your map of the world.

If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind.

Nothing is too heavy to be knocked on its ass, and everything is cool, baby. --Hassan i Sabbah X

What is true of the group is true of the individual. While we all have our favorite circuit, and tend to see that circuit as "superior" to all the others, we can be pushed out of it by shocks or stresses, in which case we jump to another circuit.

We need to realize that the same technology, wisely used by intelligent men and women, can free us from every form of neurotic and irrational rigidity, to dial and focus our nervous systems as easily as we dial or focus our TV, turning any channel or circuit off and on as we choose. This is what metaprogramming (cybernetic) consciousness means.

The only answer I can see is that no speculation is obnoxious to an open mind but all new and challenging speculations are obnoxious to Fundamentalists.

The brain never remembers like a tape recorder or repeats like a parrot. Even the most rigid and compulsive types (Catholics, Marxists, members of CSICOP, etc.) do a lot more re-associating, re-framing and creative editing than they consciously realize.

Obviously, an ideally "balanced" person — that is, one not robotized and able to adjust to circumstances as they arise — would not be so off-centered. Such a person would be able to move a little bit into each quadrant "according to the times and seasons" as the Chinese say, but would basically maintain a centered detachment between all of them. She or he could be graphed as a circle:

He made a sympathetic shrug, then spread his hands. "Flexibility, my friend. Flexibility is the key to all happiness. Remember that.

whereas the Catholic Church is unified under a pope, the Orthodox world is more an assemblage of "independent local Churches" that are "highly flexible" and "easily adapted to changing conditions.