Quotes About Evolution

You've got very badly to want to get rid of the old, before anything new will appear — even in the self.

All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day.

Paul felt life changing around him. The conditions of youth were gone.

If the one I love remains unchanged and unchanging, I shall cease to love her. It is only because she changes and startles me into change and defies my inertia, and is herself staggered in her inertia by my changing, that I can continue to love her. If she stayed put, I might as well love the pepper-pot.

This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not organic, but mechanical.

and in just a few hours

This is going

We are gods in the chrysalis.

If you are satisfied with the results you are now getting, why change? If you are not satisfied, why not experiment?

but in the beginning, she was—well, susceptible to improvement.

In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.

the sobering realization of the meaning of progress.

All things in this world are historical.

In some evolving civilizations, for reasons which we don't entirely understand, the evolution of consciousness is attended by a disaster of some sort which occurs shortly after the Sy breakthrough. It has something to do with the discovery of the self and the incapacity to deal with it, the consciousness becoming self-conscious but not knowing what to do with the self, not even knowing what its self is, and so ending by being that which is not, and making others what they are not.

If Darwin was right, asked Wallace, why does the Tierra del Fuegan possess a brain not discernibly different from, say, Einstein's or Beethoven's, which he does not need?

Neo-Darwinian theory has trouble accounting for the strange, sudden, and belated appearance of man, the conscious self which speaks, lies, deceives itself, and also tells the truth.

The evolutionary facts about the emergence of man, e.g., the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon man) no more than 35 thousand years ago, are as spectacular as the account in Genesis and allow hardly less room for theology.

The purpose of life for man is growth, just as the purpose of life for trees and plants is growth.

Explosive bifurcation is the sudden transition that wrenches the system out of one order, and into another.

I wrapped my arms around my chest. I'd read somewhere that that was an instinct left over from caveman days: protect your heart.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments.

The past and the present wilt. I have fill'd them, emptied them, And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them. And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. -from Song of Myself