Quotes About Evolution

Things change. Stuff happens. Life goes on.

In all the photos I see the boy I once knew and the man he became, a flawed but decent man whom I grew to care about in a more complicated way than I had ever cared about the boy.

A person can only move forward, she thinks. A person should only move forward.

It was always sad, the way the world was going. And always a new age dawning.

You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.

oh, I can't really explain what I thought! But it was very strange to think that the children I had were already—in just one generation—so different, so very different, from me and what I had come from.

But never mind, Olive thinks now. You move aside and make way for the new.

People always kept moving, her mother had said, it's the American way. Moving west, moving south, marrying up, marrying down, getting divorced—but moving.

But it's never starting over, Cindy, it's just continuing on.

I thought of how my life had become so different from what I had ever imagined for myself during these—my last—years.

a noted academic had said at a lecture last year. The dawning of a new age. There was always a new age dawning.

But it was very strange to think that the children I had were already—in just one generation—so different, so very different, from me and what I had come from. And from what Catherine had come from as well. I don't know why this came to me with such force at that moment, but it did.

The trees off to the side have been cut down to make a parking lot. You get used to things, he thinks, without getting used to things.

Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?

Amoebas at the start Were not complex; They tore themselves apart And started Sex.

We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision. To restrain this, is inevitably to bring a Rust upon Men's Understanding.

The Scottish Enlightenment presented man as the product of history. Our most fundamental character as human beings, they argued, even our moral character, is constantly evolving and developing, shaped by a variety of forces over which we as individuals have little or no control. We are ultimately creatures of our environment: that was the great discovery that the "Scottish school," as it came to be known, brought to the modern world.

With Saint Augustine, we come to the end of the road as far as the Greco-Roman world is concerned.

the commercial stage represents the greatest change from the past.

Nordau's theories gave a new twist to the question of how man's biological evolution and society's historical evolution intersected. A fourth and disturbing possibility now presented itself: even healthy human specimens living in advanced civilized society would, unless corrective steps were taken, degenerate into a lesser physical and moral type.

The credit for defining the artist as a person who can hold two inconsistent ideas at once goes to F. Scott Fitzgerald. The credit for realizing that that is precisely what all modern men can do—indeed, must be able to do— belongs to Sir Walter Scott.

Instead of stability, Heraclitus said, there is only change: ceaseless, relentless, and without end. In the desperate watercourse of existence, any notion we have of permanent or fixed values, even of our own body, is pure illusion. Instead, everywhere we look, everything we see is in constant flux and change.

Fundamental to the Scottish notion of history is the idea of progress. The Scots argued that societies, like individuals, grow and improve over time. They acquire new skills, new attitudes, and a new understanding of what individuals can do and what they should be free to do. The Scots would teach the world that one of the crucial ways we measure progress is by how far we have come from what we were before. The present judges the past, not the other way around.

If we want to know what a man really is, we need to focus not on where he came from or what he left behind, but on what he can do now and in the future, as part of his own dynamic nature. What applies to individual dogs and men can be extended to human beings in general. For Aristotle's disciples in the eighteenth century such as Adam Smith, it even applies to entire societies. In the Aristotelian mind-set, it is the future that counts, not the past.