Adjustment Quotes - Page 9

• We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

  R. D. Laing

  Civilization, Driven, Destruction

  35 Copy quote

• ...the change was adjustment without improvement.

  Toni Morrison

  Improvement

  5 Copy quote

• He'd never had to make the adjustments and compromises other people accepted early in their romantic careers; never had a chance to learn the lesson that Sarah taught him everyday--that beauty was only a part of it, and not even the most important part, that there were transactions between people that occurred on some mysterious level beneath the skin, or maybe even beyond the body.

  Tom Perrotta

  Careers, People, Everyday

  Tom Perrotta (2007). “Little Children: A Novel”, p.128, St. Martin's Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Our World, Creative, Majority

  Martin Luther King (Jr.) (2012). “A Gift of Love: Sermons from Strength to Love and Other Preachings”, p.18, Beacon Press

  28 Copy quote

  Show source

• The human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its own ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature's compulsions; it doubts its own sensations and trusts only in instruments and averages.

  Christopher Morley

  Sleep, Average, Doubt

  Christopher Morley (2013). “The Haunted Bookshop”, p.129, Melville House

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Meg, don't you think you'd make a better adjustment to life if you faced facts?" I do face facts," Meg said. They're lots easier to face than people, I can tell you.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Thinking, People, Meg

  Madeleine L'Engle (2013). “A Wrinkle in Time Trilogy”, p.24, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Those who feel guilty contemplating "betraying" the tradition they love by acknowledging their disapproval of elements within it should reflect on the fact that the very tradition to which they are so loyal—the "eternal" tradition introduced to them in their youth—is in fact the evolved product of many adjustments firmly but delicately made by earlier lovers of the same tradition.

  Daniel Dennett

  Elements, Loyal, Facts

  Daniel C. Dennett (2007). “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon”, p.255, Penguin UK

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; if is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment from which forms the secret of civilization.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Graduation, Education, Teacher

  W. E. B. Du Bois (2016). “The Souls of Black Folk”, p.71, First Avenue Editions

  30 Copy quote

  Show source

• Toilet paper - and no baby wipes - in the bathroom. If they're using dry paper, they aren't washing all of themselves. It's just unclean. So if I go in a woman's house and see the toilet paper there, I'll explain this. And if she doesn't make the adjustment to baby wipes, I'll know she's not completely clean.

  Terrence Howard

  Baby, House, Wipe

  "Howard's Den". Interview with Andrew Goldman, www.elle.com. August 1, 2007.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• In my view, [the trade deficit] will create political turmoil at some point...Pretty soon, I think there will be a big adjustment.

  Warren Buffett

  Thinking, Views, Political

  4 Copy quote

• It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Eye, Looks, Great Gatsby Important

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more”, p.537, e-artnow

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Living is not thinking. Thought is formed and guided by objective reality outside us. Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new.

  Thomas Merton

  Wisdom, Reality, Thinking

  Thomas Merton (2011). “Thoughts In Solitude”, p.32, Macmillan

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I see the hitter when he's moved in the box, like when he's moved closer to the plate or changed his stance. I see when the batter has moved his feet, and then I make my own adjustment.

  Mariano Rivera

  Feet, Boxes, Plates

  14 Copy quote

• Alex, Add it up. No matter how much you want her in your life, she doesn’t belong. A triangle can’t fit into a square. Just pointing out the facts” "“Gracias” I don’t point out that if it’s a big enough square, a small triangle can fit inside perfectly. All you have to do is make a few adjustments.

  Simone Elkeles

  Squares, Add, Alex

  Simone Elkeles (2010). “Perfect Chemistry”, p.121, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Adjustment? She called that an adjustment? How about I adjust her right out of existence?

  Kim Harrison

  Existence

  4 Copy quote

• Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.

  Martha Beck

  Change, Thinking, Self

  "Ever Wonder Why Butterflies Don’t Chill With Caterpillars?" by Dr. Samineh I. Shaheem, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 31, 2015.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.

  Herbert Spencer

  Life, Reality, Relation

  Herbert Spencer (2016). “The Principles of Ethics - Completed: Great Essays”, p.24, VM eBooks

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Amendments occupy a great deal of most legislators' time, particularly those lawmakers in the minority. Members of Congress do author major bills, but more commonly they make minor adjustments to the bigger bill.

  Matt Taibbi

  Minorities, Bills, Amendments

  Matt Taibbi (2007). “Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire”, p.20, Black Cat

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• The biggest surprise has been making the adjustment after losing a game. In the NBA you could lose tonight and you have to put that game behind you because you have another game the next night.

  Dwyane Wade

  Night, Nba, Games

  13 Copy quote

• The terror of the atom age is not the violence of the new power but the speed of man's adjustment to it, the speed of his acceptance.

  E. B. White

  Acceptance, Power, Men

  E. B. WHITE (1954). “The SECOND TREE from the CORNER”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Philosophy, Doors, Trying

  Conversation in 1930. "Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections". Book by Rush Rhees, Chapter 6, 1981.

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think I'm constantly in a state of adjustment.

  Patti Smith

  Thinking, States

  "The Wisdom of Patti Smith" by Victoria Dawson Hoff, www.elle.com. December 30, 2013.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• While it is clear that we need to make some adjustments to protect Social Security for the long term, it is disingenuous to say that the trust fund is facing a crisis

  Carl Levin

  Long, Needs, Social

  68 Copy quote

• The tremendous and still accelerating development of science and technology has not been accompanied by an equal development in social, economic and political patterns …it is safe to predict that… such social inventions as modern-type capitalism, facism and communism will be regarded as primitive experiments directed towards the adjustment of modern society to modern methods

  Ralph Linton

  Technology, Political, Development

  20 Copy quote

• It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals--though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt--but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I--in complacent adjustment to alien demands.

  Dag Hammarskjold

  Betrayal, Mistake, Self

  4 Copy quote