Quotes · Skopia

16 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Adaptability✕clear

Science fiction

There's no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves.

1985

★ 6.9

Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The House of the Dead · 1860

★ 6.4

It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.

Publilius Syrus

Sententiae · 43 BC

★ 3.8

Personal journal · Philosophical literature

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, for it requires that we should stand ready and firm to meet onsets which are sudden and unexpected.

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations · 180

★ 3.8

Novel · Post-colonial literature

Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kind of things they could get used to.

The God of Small Things · 1997

★ 3.8

When you are at Rome live in the Roman style: when you are elsewhere live as they live elsewhere.

St. Augustine, Letter to Casulanus · 397

★ 3.7

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or creep or drip or crash. Be water, my friend.

1971

★ 3.6

Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy-very unhappy-it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.

Samuel Butler (novelist)

The Way of All Flesh · 1902

★ 3.5

It is this ability to bear what is unbearable and to go on living, to go on doing what one is used to doing-it is this uncanny ability that the existence of the human species is based on.

1996

★ 3.5

Speech · Political speech

The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Abraham Lincoln

Second Annual Message to Congress · 1862

★ 2.9

There are no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone about him.

Anna Karenina · 1877

★ 2.3

Adopt the character of the twisting octopus, which takes on the appearance of the nearby rock. Now follow in this direction, now turn a different hue.

Theognis of Megara

541 BC

★ 1.9

Economic literature

The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind.

John Maynard Keynes

1919

★ 1.9

Novel · Magazine · Detective fiction

That's the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.

Dashiell Hammett

Black Mask · 1930

★ 1.9

Too much happens... Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything... That's what is so terrible.

William Faulkner

Light in August · 1932

★ 1.9

A great step towards independence is a good humored stomach, one that is willing to endure rough treatment.

65

★ 1.2