1,799 Quotes About Evolution

The manifest image that has been cobbled together by genetic evolutionary processes over billions of years, and by cultural evolutionary processes over thousands of years, is an extremely sophisticated system of helpful metaphorical renderings of the underlying reality uncovered in the scientific image. It is a user-illusion that we are so adept at using that we take it to be unvarnished reality, when in fact it has many coats of intervening interpretive varnish on it.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

The ecstatic state of wholeness is bound to be transient because it has no part in the total pattern of ‘adaptation through maladaptation’ which is characteristic of our species…the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing, from awareness of incompleteness.

My take on personal evolution is largely about the spirit of connecting and disconnecting things, relating to what I call “the gap” or time and space between things. It is also about becoming practical in all this, developing the power and precision to simply bring the grand ideas home, to compress the paradigm of perception/choice/action/result into a single gesture.

What you have to do to achieve what you want necessitates the creative actualization of the totality of your being as it is. Nothing more, but also nothing less.

Out of all the infinite possibilities that can take form and exist, you are one. And so am I. You and I are related in ways we know little about.

I want to give up. My sensory organs and my brain have evolved just enough to ensure that I survive and reproduce. They are not equipped to experience higher reality and answer profound questions, as that is not a survival need.

The infinite possibilities that exist in any given moment cause infinite possibilities in response. The wording is correct here; the possibilities exist already, and have already caused the existing possibilities of response.

Sometimes I wonder how much of our suffering we allow or impose on ourselves simply in search of our worthiness to accept our own respect and appreciation.