Quotes About Flexibility

Keeping an open mind is a virtue—but, as the space engineer James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out.

the future belongs to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future.

You humans have a certain talent for adaptability--at least in the short term.

No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them.

He wants it both ways—the language and credibility of science, but without being bound by its method and rules.

If you think a hammer is the only way to hammer / A nail, you ain't thought of the nail correctly.

Events and circumstances sometimes conspire against us; if we insist on inflexibility for the purpose of maintaining our beliefs, we end up compromising ourselves nevertheless. We salvage one set of principles only to forsake another.

Some decisions cannot be made in advance of the time that will demand them. We cannot always anticipate the way in which things will happen and therefore cannot anticipate what we will do. We must accept that.

I think it is something else. I think we were given a starting point, but nothing more. The future remains undecided. Things may change as events unfold, and we must be ready to change with them.

Sometimes you have to settle for doing what you can as opposed to what you think you should.

She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.

Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down.

People don't like change. But make the change fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.

Nothing has to be true forever. Just for long enough.

Tiffany has been apprenticing as a witch by visiting people in need with her mentor. After meeting with one particularly sad case, she tells her mentor, It shouldn't be like this. Her mentor replies, There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.

People build something that works. Then circumstances change, and they have to tinker with it to make it continue to work, and they are so busy tinkering that they cannot see that a much better idea would be to build a whole new system to deal with the new circumstances. But to an outsider, the idea is obvious.

You can think and you can fight, but the world's always movin', and if you wanna stay ahead you gotta dance.

It was no use getting angry with Wullie; he lived in a Wullie-shaped world of his own. You had to think diagonally.

if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

Plan A had worked. Plan B had failed. Everything depended on Plan C, and there was one drawback to this: he had only ever planned as far as B.

Commander Vimes always says that when life hands you a mess of spaghetti, you just keep pulling until you find a meatball.

I wonder what would happen if you gave up your need to be right?

We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice. Nor does love have to be all or nothing. Neither does power. What is positive and what is negative is not absolute.