Adaptation Quotes

1. "I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in."
Author: Alfred De Vigny

2. "Sence and Sensibility, for instance, came out in three separate volumes, as did Pride and Prejudice (so the next time you read one of the ubiquitous time-travel Austen adaptations and somebody picks up a single-volume first edition, you can hit your nerd buzzer and say "wrong!")."
Author: Amy Smith

3. "The ecstatic state of wholeness is bound to be transient because it has no part in the total pattern of ‘adaptation through maladaptation' which is characteristic of our species…the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness."
Author: Anthony Storr

4. "The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation.I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine.That is ,by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable.The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair.He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the depths of misery cheerfulness keeps breaking in."
Author: Arthur Koestler

5. "In the game of life, less diversity means fewer options for change. Wild or domesticated, panda or pea, adaptation is the requirement for survival."
Author: Cary Fowler

6. "Live the way you are prompted to do so by your inner soul. If you trust that you shall easily adapt to someone's lifestyle, attitude or mannerism, you are absolutely wrong! And, as a consequence of such an adaptation, you would find yourself in doldrums throughout the path of your life . Be content with the totality in yourself. Be proud of being yourself, whatever you are or whoever you are."
Author: Chandrababu V.S.

7. "John Laroche: You know why I like plants?Susan Orlean: Nuh uh.John Laroche: Because they're so mutable. Adaptation is a profound process. Means you figure out how to thrive in the world.Susan Orlean: [pause] Yeah but it's easier for plants. I mean they have no memory. They just move on to whatever's next. With a person though, adapting almost shameful. It's like running away."
Author: Charlie Kaufman

8. "Adaptation seems to be, to a substantial extent, a process of reallocating your attention."
Author: Daniel Kahneman

9. "Compared to forest or aquatic ecosystems, grassland is unstable. It requires rather precise geological and climatic conditions, and if these conditions are not maintained--if too much rain falls, or too little--it quickly turns into forest or desert, both of which are dominated by woody plants. This instability is reflected in the spectacular but brief careers of various grassland faunas. Humanity, with its dazzling symbioses, preadaptations, and neoteny, is the most spectacular of these--and may well be the briefest."
Author: David Rains Wallace

10. "Upon the publication of Goethe's epic drama, the Faustian legend had reached an almost unapproachable zenith. Although many failed to appreciate, or indeed, to understand this magnum opus in its entirety, from this point onward his drama was the rule by which all other Faust adaptations were measured. Goethe had eclipsed the earlier legends and became the undisputed authority on the subject of Faust in the eyes of the new Romantic generation. To deviate from his path would be nothing short of blasphemy."
Author: E.A. Bucchianeri

11. "Curiously enough man's body and his mind appear to differ in their climatic adaptations."
Author: Ellsworth Huntington

12. "Phylogenesis is the mechanical cause of ontogenesis.1 In other words, the development of the stem, or race, is, in accordance with the laws of heredity and adaptation, the cause of all the changes which appear in a condensed form in the evolution of the fœtus."
Author: Ernst Haeckel

13. "Science always has its origin in the adaptation of thought to some definite field of experience."
Author: Ernst Mach

14. "Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations."
Author: Frank Darabont

15. "Remember that in every single case in history the process of adaptation has been one of exceeding slowness. Do not look for the impossible, but do not let your path deviate from the quiet and steadfast insistence on full opportunities for your powers."
Author: Franz Boas

16. "The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen."
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

17. "I see only adaptations - not revolutions."
Author: Gordon Getty

18. "As China is about adaptation, not transformation, it is unlikely to change the world dramatically should it ever assume the global driver's seat. But this does not mean that China won't exploit that world for its own purposes."
Author: Ivan Krastev

19. "Adaptation is one of the great advantages to being born and bred in Jersey. We're simply not bested by bad air or tainted water. We're like that catfish with lungs. Take us out of our environment and we can grow whatever body parts we need to survive. After Jersey the rest of the country's a piece of cake. You want to send someone into a fallout zone? Get him from Jersey. He'll be fine."
Author: Janet Evanovich

20. "The strain of constant adaptation to so many fearful events and discoveries is already too much to bear with sanity; one has to keep pretending to slip successfully into the new mould; a time will come when the tailored and camouflaged mind breaks beneath the burden; the stick insect in our brains no longer cares to resemble a twig on the same habitual human tree in the mere hope that it may survive extinction."
Author: Janet Frame

21. "Life is neither static nor unchanging. With no individuality, there can be no change, no adaptation and, in an inherently changing world, any species unable to adapt is also doomed."
Author: Jean M. Auel

22. "Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds."
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

23. "True freedom, which is full joy, is the complete recognition of law and adaptation to it. Bondage comes from ignorance of law or opposition to it."
Author: John Andreas Widtsoe

24. "Like springs, adaptations can only go downhill."
Author: John Simon

25. "Winning = adaptation and one step forward to take the prize"
Author: Jury Nel

26. "Morality comes from religion? There are no Baptist babies or Catholic babies or Muslim babies. Religion is imposed on children by adults and society, and morality is an evolutionary adaptation. Period."
Author: Kelli Jae Baeli

27. "L'oubli dont je commençais à sentir la force et qui est un si puissant instrument d'adaptation à la réalité parce qu'il détruit peu à peu le passé survivant qui est en constante contradiction avec elle."
Author: Marcel Proust

28. "Remember this: When you cross my doorstep, you have already been raised. With what you have learned...you know the difference between right and wrong. Do right. Don't anybody raise you from the way you have been raised. Know you will have to make adaptations, in love, in relationships, in friends, in society, in work, but don't let anybody change your mind."
Author: Maya Angelou

29. "But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost--they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching."
Author: Michael Crichton

30. "It's a measure of how far I've come that I didn't bother to say, "This is impossible."I'd gotten the hang of it now.-Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (comics adaptation by Mike Carey and Glenn Fabry)"
Author: Mike Carey

31. "I'm going to do an adaptation of the Italian film, Bread and Tulips. I really like that film."
Author: Norman Jewison

32. "The differences you perceive between Humans—between groups of Humans—are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments"
Author: Octavia E. Butler

33. "Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, ‘No, I'm not interested.' I believe that each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. And that is why, whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves feeling disappointed, saying: ‘the book is so much better than the film."
Author: Paulo Coelho

34. "It was 1978 when Superman came out, and I kept thinking, Why don't they do something about it? They've done all these crappy attempts at comic book film adaptations. What can we do different? Why don't we just re-release this thing?"
Author: Richard Donner

35. "A great novel is concerned primarily with the interior lives of its characters as they respond to the inconvenient narratives that fate imposes on them. Movie adaptations of these monumental fictions often fail because they become mere exercises in interior decoration."
Author: Richard Schickel

36. "Yesterday's adaptations are today's routines."
Author: Ronald A. Heifetz

37. "Genetics might be adequate for explaining microevolution, but microevolutionary changes in gene frequency were not seen as able to turn a reptile into a mammal or to convert a fish into an amphibian. Microevolution looks at adaptations that concern the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest... The origin of species — Darwin's problem — remains unsolved."
Author: Scott F. Gilbert

38. "My mother came from St. Thomas. I heard that melody and all I did was actually adapt it. I made my adaptation of sort of an island traditional melody. It did become sort of my trademark tune."
Author: Sonny Rollins

39. "We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility. Organisms inherit a body form and a style of embryonic development; these impose constraints upon future change and adaptation. In many cases, evolutionary pathways reflect inherited patterns more than current environmental demands. These inheritances constrain, but they also provide opportunity. A potentially minor genetic change […] entails a host of complex, nonadaptive consequences. The primary flexibility of evolution may arise from nonadaptive by-products that occasionally permit organisms to strike out in new and unpredictable directions. What "play" would evolution have if each structure were built for a restricted purpose and could be used for nothing else? How could humans learn to write if our brain had not evolved for hunting, social cohesion, or whatever, and could not transcend the adaptive boundaries of its original purpose?"
Author: Stephen Jay Gould

40. "At a minimum, in explaining evolutionary pathways through time, the constraints imposed by history rise to equal prominence with the immediate advantages of adaptation."
Author: Stephen Jay Gould

41. "Because of my medical and ideological training, I am accustomed to saying that life is adaptation and symbiosis."
Author: Tabare Vazquez

42. "After Strangelove I also started work on an adaptation of The Collector."
Author: Terry Southern

43. "-It is possible to vastly compress most learning. In a surprising number of cases, it is possible to do something in 1-10 months that is assumed to take 1-10 years. -The more you compress things, the more physical limiters become a bottleneck. All learning is physically limited. The brain is dependent on finite quantities of neurotransmitters, memories require REM and non-REM (NREM) sleep for consolidation, etc. The learning graph is not unlike the stress-recovery-hyperadaptation curves of weight training. -The more extreme your ambition, just as in sports, the more you need performance enhancement via unusual schedules, diet, drugs, etc. -Most important: due to the bipolar nature of the learning process, you can forecast setbacks. If you don't, you increase the likelihood of losing morale and quitting before the inflection point."
Author: Timothy Ferriss

44. "Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature."
Author: Trofim Lysenko

45. "Perceptions trained in another climate and another landscape have had to be modified. That means we have had to learn to quit depending on perceptual habit. Our first and hardest adaptation was to learn all over again how to see. Our second was to learn to like the new forms and colors and light and scale when we had learned to see them. Our third was to develop new techniques, a new palette, to communicate them. And our fourth, unfortunately out of of our control, was to train an audience that would respond to what we wrote or painted."
Author: Wallace Stegner

46. "The films that I've done before were original stories most of the time, I did two adaptations before this, but they were mostly original stories where I had complete freedom to evolve in the direction I wanted."
Author: Walter Salles

47. "I think before 1997 is over, NATO will have taken giant strides in what's called adaptation, the discussions about bringing the French fully into the NATO forces."
Author: Warren Christopher

48. "I've found that it's actually more of a disability to be tall than short. I have no problem fitting into plane toilets etc, and the adaptations made for wheelchair users - such as the lowering of bank machines - work for me as well."
Author: Warwick Davis

49. "L'inconvénient majeur de la liaison passagère, du point de vue de l'économie sexuelle, c'est qu'elle ne permet pas une adaptation sensuelle des partenaires aussi complète que la liaison durable, ni par conséquent une satisfaction sexuelle aussi complète. Du point de vue de l'économie sexuelle, c'est là l'objection sérieuse à la liaison passagère et le meilleur argument en faveur de liaison durable. Les champions du mariage pousseront ici un soupir d'aise, croyant pouvoir réintroduire frauduleusement le moralisme monogamique. Mais nous serons obligés de les décevoir à nouveau : quand nous parlons de liaison durable, nous ne fixons pas de limites de temps ; du point de vue de l'économie sexuelle, il se peut que cet liaison dure des semaines, des mois, deux ans ou dix ans ; et nous ne disons pas non plus que cette relation doit ou devrait être monogamique ; car nous ne fixons pas de normes. (p. 193)"
Author: Wilhelm Reich

50. "Of the contributions made during the essayist period three call for notice: Weismann deserves mention for his useful work in asking for the proof that "acquired characters" or, to speak more precisely, parental experience can really be transmitted to the offspring. The ocurrence of progressive adaptation by transmission of effects of use had seemed so natural to Darwin and his contemporaries that no proof of the physiological reality of the henomenon was thought necessary. Weismann's challenge revealed the utter inadequacy of the evidence on which the beliefs were based. They are doubtless isolated observations which may be interpreted as favouring the belief in these transmissions, but such meagre indications as exist are by general consent admitted to be too slight to be of much assistance in the attempt to understand how the more complex adaptive mechanisms arose."
Author: William Bateson

Adaptation Quotes Pictures