Quotes About Evolution

Eric Hoffer, the street philosopher, put it this way: "In times of great change [which is always], learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists.

Yearning for a new way will not produce it. Only ending the old way can do that.

We are a "first-half-of-life culture," largely concerned about surviving successfully. Probably most cultures and individuals across history have been situated in the first half of their own development up to now

People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul.

It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting.

Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five...

At 53, she was through with the foolishness of men's genitals. In fact, it had been many years since she had cared what hairy things dangled between their pale, scrawny legs. She now considered the fact that she had ever cared a kind of temporary lunacy and was thankful that her madness had been short lived, not terribly virulent and ultimately cured by marriage as God intended.

Was this what we wanted from our oldest friends? Reassurance that the world we remember so fondly still exists? That it hasn't been replaced by a reality we're less fully committed to?

But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth—that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimes don't know people as well as we think we do, that the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.

How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder?

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.… Man is something that must be overcome.

And this is the great challenge of our time, the evolutionary imperative for the masculine to see through and overcome its hubris and one-sidedness, to own its own unconscious shadow, to choose to enter into a fundamentally new relationship of mutuality with the feminine in all its forms.

Thanks to our capacity to adapt to ever greater fame and fortune, yesterday's luxuries can soon become today's necessities and tomorrow's relics."6

System changes come directly from thinking changes.

Maybe some of these new changes in her life weren't going to be so bad after all.

Demagnetizing is a fact of life.

He'd changed since the last summer. Instead of Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, he wore a button-down shirt, khaki pants, and leather loafers. His sandy hair, which used to be so unruly, was now clipped short. He look like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college-age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.

Don't stay in one place too long. It was the only way to stay ahead of the sadness.

Sometimes, it takes us a while to appreciate something new, something that might change us for the better.

Sometimes small things can become very large, indeed.

No story ever ends, does it? It just leads into others.

Remake the wild, a little at a time, each in your own corner of the world. You cannot wait for anyone else, even a god, to do that for you.

The more you know, the more you try to change them, and that can be disastrous.

Zoë threw up her hands in exasperation. I hate this language. It changes too often!