Henry Miller
Novelist, Essayist
"Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring."
Adaptation quotes
Adaptation
67 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Alfred Russel Wallace
Naturalist
"In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found."
Daniel Kahneman
Psychologist, Nobel Laureate
"Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention."
Thomas A. Edison
Inventor
"Keep on the lookout for novel ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you're working on."
H. G. Wells
Writer
"We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity."
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Topics related to Adaptation
Browse quotes that often appear alongside adaptation — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Adaptation quotes (page 1 of 4)
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"Man is a pliable animal, a being who gets accustomed to everything!"
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"....shellfish are the prime cause of the decline of morals and the adaptation of an extravagant lifestyle."
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"At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation."
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"You usually get a script and you tell people what the story's about, and they have no idea what's going on. Whereas with an adaptation, you come into it, and it seems like everyone you talk to has a million opinions on the cast and the way the story should be told."
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"When I decided to make my version of Poe's stories, I wanted to respect the original material or to at least get closer to what his stories are really about. Most other adaptations I've seen sort of follow the story but they never satisfy me as an audience member or as a reader."
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"People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along."
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"What an odd time to be a fundamentalist about adaptation and natural selection - when each major subdiscipline of evolutionary biology has been discovering other mechanisms as adjuncts to selection's centrality."
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"Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?"
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"...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations."
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"Architecture ... the adaptation of form to resist force."
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