Quotes About Evolution

Damn all fixed ideas!

Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. No; he is a thinking erratum, that's what he is. Each season of life is an edition that corrects the last and that will be corrected in turn until the definitive edition, which the editor delivers to the worms, free of charge.

I do not think that I will ever reach a stage when I will say, This is what I believe. Finished. What I believe is alive ... and open to growth

A life form which can't adapt doesn't last very long.

What happens to what's happened?

There's no such thing as an unbreakable scientific rule, because, sooner or later, they all seem to get broken. Or to change.

A truly great work of art breaks beyond the bounds of the period and culture in which it is created, so final judgement on a current book has to be deferred until it can be seen outside this present moment.

resulting in the appearance in the offspring of a character which is not present in the parents but which is potentially transmissible to its offspring.

And perhaps if we ever have real equality with all our glorious differences, the language itself will make the appropriate changes. For language, like a story or a painting, is alive. Ultimately it will be the artists who will change the language (as Chaucer did, as Dante did, as Joyce did), not the committees.

Yesterday's heresy becomes tomorrow's dogma," the bishop replied mildly, and Polly thought once again of Giordano Bruno.

But she was one of those people who change very little between twenty and sixty. Instead of growing and developing into whatever kind of creatures they are, slowly and consistently, they have three periods of their lives, with sharp lines of demarcation between them: they are children, then grownups, then old men and women. Suddenly

Art?k her ÅŸeyin eskisi gibi olmas?n? beklemekten vazgeçip olanlar? kabullenmenin zaman? gelmiÅŸti.

Evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

Recognize the difference between The End and An End.

and braking

As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

A vervet, in other words, is very good at processing certain kinds of vervetish information, but not so good at processing other kinds of information.

Proficimus more irretenti: "We make progress unhindered by custom.

movie 2001: A Space Odyssey." Off to the side were dozens of keypunch machines—what passed in those days for computer terminals.

manufacturing started in earnest. It was when all the rules by which

Man evolved to feel strongly about few people, short distances, and relatively brief intervals of time; and these are still the dimensions of life that are important to him.

But it is an advance that has nothing to do with taking more pictures, or taking better pictures. It has to do with going beyond the picture.