Quotes About Flexibility

She could not then know that, even for the squarest peg, the right hole may ultimately be found

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.

Because complexity inhibits flexibility, early choices are especially crucial.

Policy is the art of the possible, the science of the relative.

Realpolitik for Bismarck depended on flexibility and on the ability to exploit every available option without the constraint of ideology.

If chess is about the decisive battle, wei qi is about the protracted campaign. The chess player aims for total victory. The wei qi player seeks relative advantage.

Anyone wishing to affect events must be opportunist to some extent. The real dis­tinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.

For nearly twenty years, Bismarck preserved the peace and eased international tension with his moderation and flexibility. But he paid the price of misunderstood greatness, for his successors and would-be imitators could draw no better lesson from his example than multiplying arms and waging a war which would cause the suicide of European civilization.

Since it is impossible to be prepared for all eventualities, the assumption of the opponent's perfect flexibility leads to paralysis of action

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

I soon found out you can't change the world. The best you can do is to learn to live with it.

from Inkpen and Choudhury, 1995:313-323) … Strategy absence need not be associated with organizational failure…. Deliberate building in of strategy absence may promote flexibility in an organization…. Organizations with tight controls, high reliance on formalized procedures, and a passion for consistency may lose the ability to experiment and innovate.

One never knows what each day is going to bring. The important thing is to be open and ready for it.

When life hands you a lemon, say, 'Oh yeah, I like lemons! What else ya got?

The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn.

A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs. It's jolted by every pebble on the road.

A person without a sense of humour is like a wagon without springs. It's jolted by every pebble on the road.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.

It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.

The unbalanced are more at home with life's twists and turns.

Every truth bends and reshapes itself or is reshaped by other forces.

All political movements are like this -- we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

I think I am at the end of a certain phase of my life. What I'm on the lookout for now is the unexpected, for things that come from outside and that I never thought might happen. Sometimes you have to watch for them so you don't automatically say no to the new, simply because you're in the habit of saying no to everything that comes along.