Unadaptable Quotes & Sayings

This, then, is the human problem: there is a price to be paid for every increase in consciousness. We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain. By remembering the past we can plan for the future. But the ability to plan for the future is offset by the "ability" to dread pain and to fear of the unknown. Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and future gives us a corresponding dim sense of the present. In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable. — Alan W. Watts

I have tipped waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters. — George Orwell

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all
Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. — F Scott Fitzgerald

In addition to being flat-out hard to do, building effectiveness into an organization often comes into direct conflict with increasing efficiency. This is an unfortunate side effect of optimization, first noted by the geneticist R. A. Fisher, and now referred to as Fisher's fundamental theorem: "The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change." Fisher's example was the giraffe. It is highly adapted to food found up among the tree branches, but so unadaptable to a new situation that it can not even pick up a peanut from the ground at the zoo. The more optimized an organism (organization) is, the more likely that the slack necessary to help it become more effective has been eliminated. — Tom DeMarco

Blood being thicker than broth, — F Scott Fitzgerald

Observations not only disturb what is to be measured, they produce it. — Pascual Jordan

I stood in bars, clothed but naked, looking from their eyes to my feet and back again. Still there was the longing to contend with: the heavy, bloody, chemical urge to consume another body and spit out its bones in a new child. How do you make a stranger so intimate when they could so easily destroy you? — Nadifa Mohamed

One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

[Snobbishness] is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them. — Joseph Epstein

A streak of green fire blasted out of the back of the shed, passed a foot over the heads of the mob, and burned a charred rosette in the woodwork over the door.
Then came a voice that was a honeyed purr of sheer deadly menance.
"This is Lord Mountjoy Quickfang Winterforth IV, the hottest dragon in the city. It could burn your head clean off."
Captain Vimes limped forward from the shadows. A small and extremely frightened golden dragon was clamped firmly under one arm. His other hand held it by the tail. The rioters watched it, hypnotized.
"Now I know what you're thinking," Vimes went on, softly. "You're wondering, after all this excitement, has it got enough flame left? And, y'know, I ain't so sure myself ... "
He leaned forward, sighting between the dragon's ears, and his voice buzzed like a knife blade: "What you've got to ask yourself is: Am I feeling lucky? — Terry Pratchett

Wealth is a form of power in our society. With great power comes great responsibility. If you have too much wealth, ipso facto, you have too much power - therefore you have too much responsibility - and you're a kind of dictator. — Will Self

Show business pays you a lot of money because eventually you're gonna get screwed. — Jay Leno

There is an appalling amount of mechanical work in the artist's life ... Talent is mysterious, but the qualities that guard, foster, and direct it are not unlike those of a good quartermaster. — Anne Truitt

I want to direct, I want to be part of something creative, something with quality. — Jonathan Brandis

My first dance ever on 'Dancing With the Stars' was to 'Let's Hear it for the Boy.' — Julianne Hough

And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord. — George Gordon Byron

Dance is so joyous. — Graeme Murphy

The other day I got out the shower and I bend down to reach for a towel, and I felt a sharp pain in my chest. Shot through my chest and up around my shoulder and down my spine. I thought 'Oh, Lord.' I thought I was dying. I bent over and looked, and I was standing on my own titty. — Eddie Murphy