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"In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless."
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"We change when circumstances necessitate it, we adapt because we have to. The real challenge is to change when circumstances don't demand it at all."

"If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'."

"To emend one's thinking constantly is a desirable practice, and one I often engage in--sometimes to the point of being almost schizophrenic. But there are cases where one should not parade changes just to prove one is up to date. In the field of ideas, as much as in other fields, monogamy is not necessarily a sign of absence of libido."

"But change proves that you are still alive. Change often measures our tolerance for folk different from ourselves. Can we accept their languages, their customs, their garments, and their foods into our own lives? If we can, then we form bonds, bonds that make wars less likely. If we cannot, if we believe that we must do things as we have always done them, then we must either fight to remain as we are, or die."

"We continuously make promises and create agreements with ourselves and others. Some of these agreements are mutually beneficial. However, when you realize that things you agreed to in the past are no longer helpful, possible, or relevant, renegotiate. Be invested enough in your situations or relationships for renegotiation to take place."

"There is a strong movement, especially in Protestantism, to recast the Christian message in order to make it acceptable to modern man."

"Changes should not scare us because it is a natural process."

"In the current era, to take adjustments in worldly interactions is knowledge (Gnan). One is to adjust to 'disadjustments'."

"Put a man in the wrong atmosphere and nothing will function as it should. He will seem unhealthy in every part. Put him back into his proper element and everything will blossom and look healthy. But if he is not in his right element, what then? Well, then he just has to make the best of appearing before the world as a cripple."

"THE SEASONS REMIND ME THAT I MUST KEEP CHANGING."
Explore more quotes by Bill Bryson

"If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you'll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors. When you walk into it, then you see it in a completely different way. You discover it in a much slower, more majestic sort of way."

"Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can."

"Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old."

"Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again. You can do this to them over and over, and they will doggedly reassemble because, like you and me and every other living thing, they have one overwhelming impulse: to continue to be."

"The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it."

"It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can."

"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it."

"Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe."
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