Quotes About Evolution

but there is every reason to think that the bulging cortex which would later measure stars and ice ages was still a dim, impoverished region in a skull box whose capacity was no greater than that of great apes.

If one could run the story of that first human group like a speeded-up motion picture through a million years of time, one might see the stone in the hand change to the flint ax and the torch.

Great minds have always seen it. That is why man has survived his journey this long. When we fail to wish any longer to be otherwise than what we are, we will have ceased to evolve. Evolution has to be lived forward. I say this as one who has stood above the bones of much that has vanished, and at midnight has examined his own face.

He was becoming something the world had never seen before - a dream animal - living at least partially within a secret universe of his own creation and sharing that secret universe in his head with other, similar heads. Symbolic communication had begun. Man had escaped out of the eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and future. The unseen gods, the powers behind the world of phenomenal appearance, began to stalk through his dreams.

We are all potential fossils, still carrying within our bodies the crudites of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age. (As quoted by Richard Powers in The Echo Maker.

It is conceivable that in principle man's motor through-ways resemble the slime trails along which are drawn the gathering mucors that erect the spore palaces, that man's cities are only the ephemeral moment of his spawning--that he must descend upon the orchard of far worlds or die.

Your mistakes are not learning experiences if you are not learning from them.

Your mistakes aren't learning experiences…if you aren't learning from them.

Veins raised themselves along the backs of my hands that summer. My handwriting changed several times. I began reading Time magazine. Soon after that it was time to go.

All we can do is acknowledge our past mistakes and use what we've learned in order to do our best going forward.

Men are the inferior sex. Adam was made first, and the first effort is always the simpler and cruder one, non? With the second, one refines.

I've seen country music go uptown, like we say, and I'm proud I was there when it happened.

In fact, the word transition seems to me to be used incorrectly. Most people use it to mean going from one identity to another, such as with surgery or the use of hormones. I understand it to mean that the person has the other identity already and the transition involves the perceptions of society aligning with that identity. In this "word flip" it is not the person who is transitioning but society, which is transitioning its perceptions of that person.

Most big transformations come about from the hundreds of tiny, almost imperceptible, steps we take along the way.

The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change." It was a paraphrase of something he'd read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person's struggles.

Before successful therapy, it's the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it's one damn thing after another.

Maybe our pasts don't define us but inform us.

far better that [a patient make progress but] forget what we talked about than the opposite possibility (a more popular choice for patients)—to remember precisely what was talked about but to remain unchanged.

think of something else Wendell once said: "The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change." It was a paraphrase of something he'd read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person's struggles

As the late psychotherapist Kohn Weakland famously said, "Before successful therapy, it's the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it's one dame thing after another.

The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.

I think of something else Wendell once said: "The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.

Before successful therapy, it's the same damn thing over and over.

Stage 1: Pre-contemplation Stage 2: Contemplation Stage 3: Preparation Stage 4: Action Stage 5: Maintenance