c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
You may have forgotten the Way: But those who came beforeDid not forget you.Saying of Master Bahaudin Naqshband of Bokhara
— Idries Shah, Neglected Aspects of Sufi Study
Every bet of evolution in history came with its built in bet of madness.
— Sameh Elsayed
like all other living creatures, I am the descendant of survivors, so the fear in my head is the voice of my ancestors whispering their accumulated wisdom.
— David George Haskell
What is it about the relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us? Her womb is the first landscape we inhabit. It is here we learn to respond - to move, to listen, to be nourished and grow. In her body we grow to be human as our tails disappear and our gills turn to lungs. Our maternal environment is perfectly safe - dark, warm, and wet. It is a residency inside the Feminine. When we outgrow our mother's body, our cramps become her own. We move. She labors. Our body turns upside down in hers as we journey through the birth canal. She pushes in pain. We emerge, a head. She pushes one more time, and we slide out like a fish. Slapped on the back by the doctor, we breath. The umbilical cord is cut - not at our request. Separation is immediate. A mother reclaims her body, for her own life. Not ours. Minutes old, our first death is our own birth.
— Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
Yes, sir, but the Librarian likes bananas, sir.""Very nourishin' fruit, Mr Stibbons.""Yes, sir. Although, funnily enough it's not actually a fruit, sir.""Really?""Yes, sir. Botanically, it's a type of fish, sir. According to my theory it's cladistically associated with the Krullian pipefish, sir, which of course is also yellow and goes around in bunches or shoals.""And lives in trees?""Well, not usually, sir. The banana is obviously exploiting a new niche.""Good heavens, really? It's a funny thing, but I've never much liked bananas and I've always been a bit suspicious of fish, too. That'd explain it.
— Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology which are likely to have similar universal validity? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything which must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered which boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found which is not based on chemistry at all, but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle which is true of all life? Obviously I do not know but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become	the basis for an evolutionary process.
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Definitions from Mulla Do-PiazaDrugs: Source of the mystical experience of the ignorant.
— Idries Shah
Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.
— George Gaylord Simpson
To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey—and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.
— George Gaylord Simpson, This View of Life: The World of an Evolutionist
Among the things most characteristic of organisms--most distinctive of living as opposed to inorganic systems--is a sort of directedness. Their structures and activities have an adaptedness, an evident and vital usefulness to the organism. Darwin's answer and ours is to accept the common sense view...[that] the end ("telos") [is] that the individual and the species may survive. But this end is (usually) unconscious and impersonal. Naive teleology is controverted not by ignoring the obvious existence of such ends but by providing a naturalistic, materialistic explanation of the adaptive characteristics serving them. [Book review in "Science," 1959, p. 673.]
— George Gaylord Simpson
The essential quality that an entity needs, if it is to become an effective gene vehicle, is this. It must have an impartial exit channel into the future, for all the genes inside it. This is true of an individual wolf. The channel is the thin stream of sperms, or eggs, which it manufactures by meiosis. It is not true of the pack of wolves. Genes have something to gain from selfishly promoting the welfare of their own individual bodies, at the expense of other genes in the wolf pack. A bee-hive, when it swarms, appears to reproduce by broad-fronted budding, like a wolf pack. But if we look more carefully we find that, as far as the genes are concerned, their destiny is largely shared. The future of the genes in the swarm is, at least to a large extent, lodged in the ovaries of one queen. This is why—it is just another way of expressing the message of earlier chapters—the bee colony looks and behaves like a truly integrated single vehicle.
— Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
I don't think that evolution is supremely important because it is my specialty; it is my specialty because I think it is supremely important. [In: Edward J. Larson (2004) Evolution, Modern Library. p. 250]
— George Gaylord Simpson
The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.]
— George Gaylord Simpson
Man has risen, not fallen. He can choose to develop his capacities as the highest animal and to try to rise still farther, or he can choose otherwise. The choice is his responsibility, and his alone. There is no automatism that will carry him upward without choice or effort and there is no trend solely in the right direction. Evolution has no purpose; man must supply this for himself. The means to gaining right ends involve both organic evolution and human evolution, but human choice as to what are the right ends must be based on human evolution.
— George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of Its Significance for Man, Revised Edition
Over and over again in the study of the history of life it appears that what can happen does happen. There is little suggestion that what occurs must occur, that it was fated or that it follows some fixed plan, except simply as the expansion of life follows the opportunities that are presented. In this sense, an outstanding characteristic of evolution is its opportunism.["Meaning of Evolution," 1949, p. 160.]
— George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution: A Study of the History of Life and of Its Significance for Man, Revised Edition
[Darwin] gave an answer to the tremendous question that so deeply concerns...What is Man? [He] answered this question to the effect that man is a natural product of the universe;...man is an animal, a vertebrate, a mammal, and a primate....By bringing man into the evolutionary picture, Darwin finally took the last step in our emancipation and finally made our world rational. [Yet] Darwin felt humility and awe that seem to me truly religious. ["Darwin led us into this modern world," 1959, p. 271-272.]
— George Gaylord Simpson
Man is a glorious and unique species of animal. The species originated by evolution.... Future evolution could raise man to superb heights as yet hardly glimpsed, but it will not automatically do so. As far as can now be foreseen, evolutionary degeneration is at least as likely in our future as is further progress.The only way to ensure a progressive evolutionary future for mankind is for man himself to take a hand in the process. Although much further knowledge is needed, it is unquestionably possible for man to guide his own evolution (within limits) along desirable lines. But the great weight of the most widespread...beliefs and institutions is against even attempting such guidance. ["Man's evolutionary future," 1960, p. 134.]
— George Gaylord Simpson
If a sect does officially insist that its structure of belief demands that evolution be false, then no compromise is possible. An honest and competent biology teacher can only conclude that the sect's beliefs are wrong and that its religion is a false one.
— George Gaylord Simpson
I wanted to think of what could not be thought except in intersections; I wanted to satiate my fiendishness in a neutering gnosis. I wanted to see the first chimp paint it’s own likeness in a limbo state of gravitating iconostasis, flanked by altar candles and decked in a dark green Zuchetto upon which stars would genuflect in a prism without manacles, unrivaled by the boring, mundane phenomenon of space's black canopy loved by the plebeians.
— John Thomas Allen
Species evolve exactly as if they were adapting as best they could to a changing world, and not at all as if they were moving toward a set goal.
— George Gaylord Simpson
Saying of the ProphetStruggleThe holy warrior is he who struggles with himself.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
My simple explanation of why we human beings, the most advanced species on earth, cannot find happiness, is this: as we evolve up the ladder of being, we find three things: the first, that the tension between the range of opposites in our lives and society widens dramatically and often painfully as we evolve; the second, that the better informed and more intelligent we are, the more humble we have to become about our ability to live meaningful lives and to change anything, even ourselves; and consequently, thirdly, that the cost of gaining the simplicity the other side of complexity can rise very steeply if we do not align ourselves and our lives well.
— Dr Robin Lincoln Wood
Saying of the ProphetHumilityHumility and courtesy are themselves a part of piety.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
Evolution taught us that adaptation is the key to survival.
— Gemma Malley, The Legacy
Saying of the ProphetDeathDie before your death.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
There is a neat economic explanation for the sexual division of labour in hunter-gatherers. In terms of nutrition, women generally collect dependable, staple carbohydrates whereas men fetch precious protein. Combine the two – predictable calories from women and occasional protein from men – and you get the best of both worlds. At the cost of some extra work, women get to eat some good protein without having to chase it; men get to know where the next meal is coming from if they fail to kill a deer. That very fact makes it easier for them to spend more time chasing deer and so makes it more likely they will catch one. Everybody gains – gains from trade. It is as if the species now has two brains and two stores of knowledge instead of one – a brain that learns about hunting and a brain that learns about gathering.
— Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
My challenge to you today is to observe your thoughts and internal dialogue and recognize if and when you speak poorly to yourself. We all have moments of self-deprecation and very often we are too hard on ourselves. Today, start to be caring and supportive of yourself. Observe that little voice in your head and say something positive to yourself instead!
— Elaine Seiler, Getting Rid of Negative Energy
If about a dozen genera of birds had become extinct or were unknown, who would have ventured to have surmised that birds might have existed which used their wings solely as flappers, like the logger-headed duck (Micropterus of Eyton); as fins in the water and front legs on the land, like the penguin; as sails, like the ostrich; and functionally for no purpose, like the Apteryx. Yet the structure of each of these birds is good for it, under the conditions of life to which it is exposed, for each has to live by a struggle; but it is not necessarily the best possible under all possible conditions. It must not be inferred from these remarks that any of the grades of wing-structure here alluded to, which perhaps may all have resulted from disuse, indicate the natural steps by which birds have acquired their perfect power of flight; but they serve, at least, to show what diversified means of transition are possible.
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about business as usual.
— Yuval Noah Harari, קיצור תולדות האנושות
Many call this process 'the destruction of nature.' But it's not really destruction, it's change. Nature cannot be destroyed.
— Yuval Noah Harari, קיצור תולדות האנושות
You yourself are your own barrier – rise from within it.
— Idries Shah, The Way of the Sufi
The donkey which brought you to this door must be dismissed if you want to get through it’.
— Idries Shah, Neglected Aspects of Sufi Study
DeathIf he is a good man, death will be a release;If he is a bad one, it will release others from him.
— Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe
I am impressed anew by... how much the harshness that challenges life is what causes the beauty. Birds fly because they must escape predators and search for food. Trees grow skyward because they compete fiercely with other trees for light. Living things need something to push off of. Each of us needs challenges to give us the right shape.
— Carl Safina, Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival
We should not be too quick to dismiss our own [ocular] arrangement. As so often in biology, the situation is more complex.....we have the advantage that our own light-sensitive cells are embedded directly in their support cells (the retinal pigment epithelium) with an excellent blood supply immediately underneath. Such an arrangement supports the continuous turnover of photosensitive pigments. The human retina consumes even more oxygen than the brain, per gram, making it the most energetic organ in the body.
— Nick Lane, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution
The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical view about the pathways of life and the nature of history. ... May our poor and improbable species find joy in its new-found fragility and good fortune! Wouldn't anyone with the slightest sense of adventure, or the most weakly flickering respect for intellect, gladly exchange the old cosmic comfort for a look at something so weird and wonderful - yet so real - as *Opabinia*?
— Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
Saying of the ProphetSleepSleep is the brother of death.
— Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!-self-awareness, language, ideas and their association, reason, trade, play, choice, courage, love and altruism, laughter, concealed ovulation, kissing, face-to-face sex, female orgasm, division of labor, cannibalism, art, music, politics, and featherless bipedalism, besides tool using, tool making, and much else. Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the apes casually knock them down--toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings of Earth. Instead, we are more like the nouveau riche, incompletely accommodated to our recent exalted state, insecure about who we are, and trying to put as much distance as possible between us and our humble origins. It's as if our nearest relatives, by their very existence, refute all our explanations and justifications. So as counterweights to human arrogance and pride, it is good for us that there are still apes on Earth.
— Carl Sagan
They have fixed our nutrition and arranged our life-span. More than this, and ahead of this, efforts will not be productive.
— Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe
The myosin in our own skeletal muscles is more closely related to the myosin driving the flight muscles of that irritating housefly buzzing around your head than it is to the myosin in the muscles of your own sphincters
— Nick Lane, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution
But the world itself, as well as special attitudes, properly understood, constitute the Sufi school.
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
Two forces pervade human life, the Gita says: the upward thrust of evolution and the downward pull of our evolutionary past.
— Eknath Easwaran
When opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee.
— Jonathan Haidt
Make mankind your dwelling place.
— Idries Shah, The Dermis Probe
Readers of Darwin's life, for instance, and particularly of the published correspondence of Darwin, are henceforth naturalists in the making. Ever afterwards they are Darwins on a small scale, seeing animals and plants in an entirely different light and with a correspondingly keener interest.
— John Steeksma, Working The Mind: A Guide to the Development of Thinking Capacity for all Students and Readers
All social animals, including people, live under constant pressure from two competing interests: protecting themselves from others and aligning themselves with others. When these two interests are balanced, the result is dynamic social homeostasis.
— Mystery, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed
Humans are built to move. We evolved under conditions that required daily intense physical activity, and even among individuals with lower physical potential, that hard-earned genotype is still ours today. The modern sedentary lifestyle leads to the inactivation of the genes related to physical performance, attributes that were once critical for survival and which are still critical for the correct, healthy expression of the genotype. The genes are still there, they just aren't doing anything because the body is not stressed enough to cause a physiological adaptation requiring their activation. The sedentary person's heart, lungs, muscles, bones, nerves and brain all operate far below the level at which they evolved to function, and at which they still function best.
— Mark Rippetoe, Practical Programming for Strength Training
From Lankaster to Lorenz, scientists have gotten it wrong. Parasites are complex, highly adapted creatures that are at the heart of the story of life. If there hadn't been such high walls dividing scientists who study life - the zoologists, the immunologists, the mathematical biologists, the ecologists - parasites might have been recognized sooner as not disgusting, or at least not merely disgusting. If parasites were so feeble, so lazy, how was it that they could manage to live inside every free-living species and infect billions of people? How could they change with time so that medicines that could once treat them became useless? How could parasites defy vaccines, which could corral brutal killers like smallpox and polio?
— Carl Zimmer, Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures
And I've been thinking: if the human race manages to destroy itself, as it often seems to want to do, or if some great disaster comes, as it did for the dinosaurs, then the birds will still manage to survive. When our gardens and fields and farms and woods have turned wild, when the park at the end of Falconer Road has turned into a wilderness, when our cities are in ruins, the birds will go on flying and singing and making their nests and laying their eggs and raising their young. It could be that the birds will exist for ever and for ever until the earth itself comes to an end, no matter what might happen to the other creatures. They'll sing until the end of time. So here's my thought: If there is a God, could it be that He's chosen the birds to speak for Him. Could it be true? The voice of God speaks through the beaks of birds.
— David Almond, My Name Is Mina
What believer of faith among us can claim to understand the exact mechanistic structure of a world created by a god/God.
— Kevin Michel, Moving Through Parallel Worlds To Achieve Your Dreams
What you have to learn is how to find the unworldly in everything.
— Idries Shah, The Commanding Self
. . . [A] creationist spy named Luther Sunderland snuck into a closed scientific meeting of the Systematics Discussion Group at the American Museum in 1981 with a hidden tape recorder. . . . My friend, the distinguished paleoichthyologist Colin Patterson of the British Museum in London, was talking about pattern cladism and how he had abandoned many of the assumptions about evolution that he had once held, including the recognition of ancestors in the fossil record. He was now only interested in the simplest hypotheses that were easily tested, such as cladograms. But, of course, taken out of context, it sounds as though Colin doubted that evolution had taken place, yet he said nothing of the sort! Colin was speaking in a kind of "shorthand" that makes sense to the scientists who understand the subtleties of the debate, but mean something entirely different when taken out of context. I was at that meeting and was stunned to read afterward about Sunderland's account of what had happened because I remembered Colin's ideas clearly and could not imagine how they could be misinterpreted. For decades afterward, Colin had to explain over and over again what he had meant, and why he did not doubt the fact that evolution had occurred, only that he no longer accepted a lot of the other assumptions about evolution that Neo-Darwinists had made. Unfortunately, Colin died in 1998 while he was still in his scientific prime, unable to continue fighting these misinterpretations of his ideas that continue to be propagated by the creationists.
— Donald R. Prothero
There is the potential for a particle of matter to be located where we expect it to be or to be located anywhere in the physical world. So it is with our lives – our very next moment can occur along the most probable path or it can occur on a path entirely discontinuous with the expectations that others have for us, but more likely in line with the expectations that we have for ourselves.
— Kevin Michel, Moving Through Parallel Worlds To Achieve Your Dreams
Evolutionary biology is imperialistic, overtaking entire fields of endeavor simply by attaching the prefix bio – or neuro -- to their names: bioethics, no comics, even, God help us, neurotheology. Its logic is deployed against helpless laymen as a bully's truncheon or an argument stopper.
— Andrew Ferguson
Trying to force something is the best way to stop it from happening.
— Idries Shah, The Commanding Self
Women, churchgoers, and conservative were more likely than men, nonchurch goers, and liberals to disagree with the reductionist (neural) account of human life.
— Andrew Ferguson
It is high time that we grew up and left the Garden. We are indeed Eden’s children, yet it is time to place Genesis alongside the geocentric myth in the basket of stories that once, in a world of intellectual naivete, made helpful sense. As we walk through the gates, aware of the dazzling richness of the genuine biological world, there might even be a smile on the Creator’s face — that at long last His creatures have learned enough to understand His world as it truly is.
— Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution
Extremely unlikely events occur every moment and it is not a priori unthinkable that the evolution of life should be due to mere chance than that a particular order in a pack of cards should result from mechanical shuffling.
— Leszek Kołakowski, Religion: If There is No God...on God, the Devil, Sin and Other Worries of the So-Called Philosophy of Religion
If you assume that it is there, you will generally not be far off the truth…
— Idries Shah, The Commanding Self
Gordon Van Wylen, Chairman of the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan commented that, “The question that arises is how the universe got into the state of reduced entropy in the first place, since all natural processes known to us tend to increase entropy?” (Gordon Van Wylen and Richard Edwin Sonntag, Fundamentals of Classical Thermodynamics, 1973). He concludes by saying, “The author has found that the second law [of thermodynamics] tends to increase conviction that there is a Creator.
— Gordon J. Van Wylen
Charles Darwin's only mistake was in not being a physicist, because the entire process of evolution started before our planet formed, with the event called the big bang, at this point our knowledge is such that I can hazard this further observation, all of the building blocks of life started at that moment, and that is how far we can back track this process of evolution.
— Steve Merrick
Dan Nilsson even remarks of compound eyes that ‘It is only a small exaggeration to say that evolution seems to be fighting a desperate battle to improve a basically disastrous design.
— Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable
Ever since about 3.8 billion years ago, when the first cells began quivering in the primordial ooze, Evolution has produced a nonstop parade of inflatable noses, bizarre genitalia, awkward feeding habits, aggressively antisocial tendencies, and mucus. So much mucus.
— Mara Grunbaum, WTF, Evolution?!: A Theory of Unintelligible Design
That's not me, Honey. That's evolution!
— A. Cretan
The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.
— Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of
The Path is not to be found anywhere except in human service
— Idries Shah, Seeker After Truth
it was being written in the East that 'Sufism was formerly a reality without a name: now it is a name without a reality'.
— Idries Shah, Neglected Aspects of Sufi Study
Corvina must have been so different then ... really literally a different person. At what point do you make that call? At what point should you just give someone a new name? Sorry, no, you don't get to be Corvina anymore. Now you're Corvina 2.0 - a dubious upgrade.
— Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
But the Sufis work IN the world, and therefore WITH 'things of the world'.
— Idries Shah, Seeker After Truth
The fact that mammalian crying serves as a cue for maternal support, rather than as a dinner bell, is a major evolutionary difference.
— Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect
...I suspect everyone there can reason along the lines I described...It's just that when it comes to evolution, and especially to the related realization that we are all pretty small bits of the universe, it seems as though Ham and his followers just can't handle the truth. They throw aside their common sense and cling to the hope that there's something that makes it okay to *not* think for themselves.""The irony is, in the process they are walking away from our ability to understand who we are, where we came from, and how we fit into a cosmos...If there is something divine in our nature, something that sets humans apart from all creatures, surely our ability to reason is a key part of it. The irony is, in the process they are walking away from our ability to understand who we are, where we came from, and how we fit into a cosmos...If there is something divine in our nature, something that sets humans apart from all creatures, surely our ability to reason is a key part of it.
— Bill Nye
...causing her eyes to bulge and her tongue to flick from behind her luscious lips, scaring away insects." — Amok 2015
— Fred Barnett
But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.
— Charles Darwin
After we’re feasted down to white sticks and it’s all covered in lions and trees and whatever the monkeys become prod the ground with a toe, staring down with glittering eyes at the guts of a wristwatch. After the bonfires and sun worship and they grow brains and can x-ray the ground. They can figure all this out, file it away. List my name with an asterisk after it, a footnote at the bottom phrasing my presence here in short, dull terminology.
— Eric Sennevoight, The Rocket Garden
In The Newly Evolving World, Everyone Is Part Of The Collective.
— Elaine Seiler, Multi-Dimensional You: Exploring Energetic Evolution
However life started, once established, it persisted for over 3.5 billion years and evolved from microbial slime to the sophistication of human civilization.
— David C. Catling, Astrobiology: A Very Short Introduction
It's Survival of Them Who's Best at Nicking Things, girl!
— Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Sufis are not here to satisfy a demand. They exist to share what they have got. These two things are not always the same.
— Idries Shah, The Commanding Self
The principle chore of brains is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing [the world] is advantageous so long as it... enhances an organism's chances for survival. Truth, whatever that is, takes the hindmost.
— Patricia Churchland
Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.
— Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
The slower frequencies are dropping away to be replaced by the faster, higher, more refined frequencies that are part of the Energetic Evolution.
— Elaine Seiler, Your Multi-Dimensional Workbook: Exercises for Energetic Awakening
Breaking up is a natural evolution when you try to figure out what you want in life. If you’re with an individual who isn’t moving in the same direction and at the same rate that you are, it ain’t going to work.
— Usher Raymond
You can perceive a person's aspiration if it is genuine, because this creates a change in the emanations from such a person.
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
The automatism of man is overcome, in the words of Dhun'Nun, by aiming for 'being as you were, where you were, before you were'.
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget.
— Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the Stars
Life  doesn't  happen  suddenly.  It fades  in.
— M.., The Meaning(s) of Life: A Human's Guide to the Biology of Souls
With all respect to your religion or world-view — thank God, thank the universe, thank evolutionary processes — the keyword is "thank" — just have some gratitude and be thankful.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Thinking your way through life’s challenges with the limited perspective of your five senses, will no longer work! YOU must expand your reality to include the unseen ‘other’ realms.
— Elaine Seiler, Multi-Dimensional You: Exploring Energetic Evolution
Traditional guidelines for manifestation in the three-dimensional world are not enough to ensure manifestation once one has begun the process of energetic evolution.
— Elaine Seiler, Your Multi-Dimensional Workbook: Exercises for Energetic Awakening
If animal history has been a history of evolution, then the history of mankind is one of retrogression. Hooray for monsters! Monsters are the great embodiments of the weak.
— Kōbō Abe, Secret Rendezvous
When will you ever accept the true ugliness of health?
— Kōbō Abe, Secret Rendezvous
Constantinople had been changing for sometime before the Young Turks got hold of it. It would continue to change long after they had gone.
— Charles Emmerson, 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War
If triangles had a god, he would have three sides.
— Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
Lemons. He liked lemons. They made you make funny faces when you bit them, and a very, very long way in the future there was a really amazing planet where they'd evolved into people and lived in harmony with a variety of hyper-intelligent bee. Evolution. Thousands and thousands of years of tiny changes could turn little burning sparks of chemistry into people, into monsters and angels and even human beings.
— Nick Harkaway, Doctor Who: Keeping Up with the Joneses
I believe in God because only an idiot can look at the complex balance of nature and believe that has not been designed. Believe it or not, but some people still believe that a watch can make itself out of sand if you just give it enough time. That’s what they call evolution. And you wonder why I am cynical. From my point of view you have to be a fool not to be cynical.
— Ted Dekker, Blink
Let's say you're walking around and you find a watch on the ground. As you examine it, you marvel at the intricately complex interweaving of its parts, a means to an end. Surely you wouldn't think this marvel would have come about by itself. The watch must have a maker. Just as the watch has such complex means to an end, so does nature to a much greater extent. Just look at the complexity of the human eye. Thus we must conclude that nature has a maker too.
— William Paley
Evolve your understanding of success from the outer realm of control, materialism, and ego, to the inner realm of surrender, spirituality, and compassion.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
It is therefore scientifically correct to say that 'natural selection has been proved to be an agent of evolutionary change' - we can, in fact, prove it by doing. But it is totally illegitimate to claim that the discovery of this mechanism - natural selection - proves that the cause of evolution 'was automatic with no room for divine guidance or design'.
— Ernst F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed
GENESG raft of yourselfE endowmentN ew generationE volutionS urvival Kamil Ali
— Kamil Ali, Profound Vers-A-Tales
If it has been revealed to man that the Almighty made him out of the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, it is in vain to tell a Christian that man was originally a speck of albumen, and passed through the stages of monads and monkeys, before he attained his present intellectual preeminence. If it be a received truth that the Creator has repeatedly interposed in the government of the universe and displayed his immediate agency in miraculous interpositions, it is an insult to any reader to tell him that the being slumbers on his throne and rules under a "primal arrangement in his counsels," and "by a code of laws of unbending operation.
— David Brewster
It is a more rational belief that man may become a brute than that a brute may become a man; and it is an easier faith that plants and animals may dwindle down into an elemental atom, than that this atom should embrace in its organization, and evolve, all the noble forms of vegetable, animal, and intellectual life.
— David Brewster
The platypus, as it turns out, derives its DNA from a menagerie of creatures. When its genome was fully decoded, it was found only to be 80% mammalian, and had genes found previously only in reptilian, bird, amphibian, and fish DNA.
— B.C. Chase
Now the leatherback turtle overcame the heat issue via a simple, but evolutionarily impossible solution; it is the only reptile that possesses fatty insulation known as brown adipose tissue, and the only reptile that regulates a high body temperature. This brown adipose tissue is the expression of the UCP1 gene, and, aside from the leatherbacks, is found only in mammals, amphibians, and fishes. Not one other reptile has UCP1.
— B.C. Chase
But because humans are intensely social animals, they also faced a recurring set of crucial social evolutionary challenges. These evolutionary challenges include (1) evading physical harm, (2) avoiding disease, (3) making friends, (4) gaining status, (5) attracting a mate, (6) keeping that mate, and (7) caring for family.
— Vladas Griskevicius, The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think
The secrets of evolution, are time and death. There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Only the search for truth is valid, the desire for wisdom the motive. The method is assimilation, not study.
— Idries Shah
If you are 'humble', it may help you in ordinary life. If you are not, you will get nowhere in higher things.
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
The secret of Sufism is that it has no secret at all'.
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
Transfixed by the bright gaze of a lizard, I become calm. This stone on which the lizard lies was under the sea when lizards first came into being, and now the flood is wearing it away, to return it once again into the oceans.
— Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
Were genuine aliens to find us… the chances were fairly good they would appear in a form beyond reckoning, shaped by the requirements of their environment. It was only for the convenience of the costume department of Star Trek that people believed in humanoid aliens.
— Thomm Quackenbush, Artificial Gods
A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability distribution of where the wings might be, like electron orbitals: a quantum-mechanical effect that maybe explains why the insect can apparently teleport from one place to another, disappearing from one point and reappearing a couple of meters away, without seeming to pass through the space in between. There sure is a lot of bright stuff in the jungle. Randy figures that, in the natural world, anything that is colored so brightly must be some kind of serious evolutionary badass.
— Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Hopeful dreams - even where crack kings’ and dope fiends feast. Dust from the ash and rubble
—  they shine like bright stars once the mic is gripped and the bars are spit.
The home world exercises its siren call over us all. No matter how far we wander, or how long we are gone, it waits patiently. And when we return to it, as we must, it sings to us. We came out of its forests, waded ashore from its seas. It is in our blood, for good or ill.
— Jack McDevitt, Seeker
In the end, only the truth will survive.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it -- perhaps as much more as the roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole.
— Will Durant
Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.
— James D. Watson, Molecular Biology of the Gene
It is the destiny of things real to destroy those that are artiﬁce.
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
No practice exists in isolation.
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
Not to be greedy is, paradoxically, the highest form of looking after one's true interests.
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
Black magic, the magic of the primeval chaos, blots out or transmogrifies the true form of things. At the stroke of twelve the princess must flee the banquet or risk discovery in the rags of a kitchen wench; coach reverts to pumpkin. Instability lies at the heart of the world. With uncanny foresight folklore has long toyed symbolically with what the nineteenth century was to proclaim a reality - namely, that form is an illusion of the time dimension, that the magic flight of the pursued hero or heroine through frogskin and wolf coat has been, and will continue to be, the flight of all men.
— Loren Eiseley, The Star Thrower
Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites.
— David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
Exercise power by means of kindness, and you may be causing more damage than you could by cruelty. Neither approach is correct.
— Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
Ending up with that gigantic outsized brain must have taken some sort of runaway evolutionary process, something that would push and push without limits.And today's scientists had a pretty good guess at what that runaway evolutionary process had been.Harry had once read a famous book called Chimpanzee Politics. The book had described how an adult chimpanzee named Luit had confronted the aging alpha, Yeroen, with the help of a young, recently matured chimpanzee named Nikkie. Nikkie had not intervened directly in the fights between Luit and Yeroen, but had prevented Yeroen's other supporters in the tribe from coming to his aid, distracting them whenever a confrontation developed between Luit and Yeroen. And in time Luit had won, and become the new alpha, with Nikkie as the second most powerful......though it hadn't taken very long after that for Nikkie to form an alliance with the defeated Yeroen, overthrow Luit, and become the new new alpha.It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity.'Cause, y'know, a human would have totally seen that one coming.
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows... It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence... Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic process.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics: And Other Essays
Species do not grow more perfect: the weaker dominate the strong again and again - the reason being they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer.... Darwin forgot the mind (- that in English): the weak possess more mind. ... To acquire mind one must need mind - one loses it when one no longer needs it. He who possesses strength divests himself of mind.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Social intelligence was therefore always at a high premium. A sharp sense of empathy can make a huge difference, and with it in an ability to manipulate, to gain cooperation, and to deceive.
— Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth
Few scientists acquainted with the chemistry of biological systems at the molecular level can avoid being inspired. Evolution has produced chemical compounds exquisitely organized to accomplish the most complicated and delicate of tasks. Many organic chemists viewing crystal structures of enzyme systems or nucleic acids and knowing the marvels of specificity of the immune systems must dream of designing and synthesizing simpler organic compounds that imitate working features of these naturally occurring compounds.
— Donald J. Cram
Sufis hold that the superior experience and knowledge comes to a man or woman in exact accordance with his worth,capacity,and earning of it.
— Idries Shah
What happens to the world when science stops evolving?
— Jennifer Ott, Serendipidus
For great many species today, “fitness” means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.
— Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
What separates man from animal is not the things we build or the ideas we stand behind. Its our ability to kill from a distance that makes us different
— Peyton J Glenn
Sufism is transmitted by means of the human exemplar, the teacher.
— Idries Shah, The Sufis
Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
The question of the position of man, as an animal, has given rise to much disputation, with the result of proving that there is no anatomical or developmental character by which he is more widely distinguished from the group of animals most nearly allied to him, than they are from one another.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century
Laziness - The laziness of adolescence is a rehearsal for the incapacity of old age.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
There can be no doubt that the existing Fauna and Flora is but the last term of a long series of equally numerous contemporary species, which have succeeded one another, by the slow and gradual substitution of species for species, in the vast interval of time which has elapsed between the deposition of the earliest fossiliferous strata and the present day.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century
All organisms vary. It is in the highest degree improbable that any given variety should have exactly the same relations to surrounding conditions as the parent stock. In that case it is either better fitted (when the variation may be called useful), or worse fitted, to cope with them. If better, it will tend to supplant the parent stock; if worse, it will tend to be extinguished by the parent stock.If (as is hardly conceivable) the new variety is so perfectly adapted to the conditions that no improvement upon it is possible,—it will persist, because, though it does not cease to vary, the varieties will be inferior to itself.If, as is more probable, the new variety is by no means perfectly adapted to its conditions, but only fairly well adapted to them, it will persist, so long as none of the varieties which it throws off are better adapted than itself.On the other hand, as soon as it varies in a useful way, i.e. when the variation is such as to adapt it more perfectly to its conditions, the fresh variety will tend to supplant the former.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, Criticism on "The origin of species"
Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among million
—  biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God
For in disease the most voluntary or most special movements, faculties, etc., suffer first and most, that is in an order the exact opposite of evolution. Therefore I call this the principle of Dissolution.
— John Hughlings Jackson
Change lives on the horizon.
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"