Quotes About Evolution

Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old--it is the new combinations that make them new.

What you were is forever who you are.

Only under extreme pressure can we change into that which it is in our most profound nature to become . . . That is what people get wrong about transformation. We're not all shallow proteans, forever shifting shape. We're not science fiction. It's like when coal becomes diamond. It doesn't afterwards retain the possibility of change. Squeeze it as hard as you like, it won't turn into a rubber ball, or a Quattro Stagione pizza, or a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It's done .

What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language...

Any story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up.

A little bit of one story joins onto an idea from another, and hey presto, . . . not old tales but new ones. Nothing comes from nothing.

The process of revision should be constant and endless

Knowledge was never simply born in the human mind; it was always reborn. The relaying of wisdom from one age to the next, this cycle of rebirths: this was wisdom.

I must finish what I've started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began.

I have been so-many too-many persons; life, unlike syntax, allows one more than three.

History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise,and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement.

This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

The adult chops down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The unsentimentality is appealing, don't you think?

?ôi khi núi non ph?i ??i d?i ?? c? nhân ???c tái ngá»™.

The ancient wisdoms are modern nonsenses. Live in your own time, use what we know, and as you grow up, perhaps the human race will finally grow up with you and put aside childish things.

The self was both its origins and its journey.

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.

When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another.

Then she found him. - And maybe he'd invented her, too, a little bit, invented someone worth rushing out of one's old life to love. - Nothing so remarkable in that. Happens often enough; and the two inventors go on, rubbing the rough edges off one another, adjusting their inventions, moulding imagination to actuality, learning how to be together; or not. It works out or it doesn't.

The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.

To be born again, first you have to die.

This is how history moves; the obsession of one moment is relegated to the junkyard of oblivion by the next.

Metamorphosis, this is what I need to explain to her, is what supplants our need for the divine. This is what we can perform, our human magic