
"The Meaning of Life: The Big Picture", Life Magazine (December 1988)
Interviews
A collection of quotes on the topic of adjustment, world, other, use.
"The Meaning of Life: The Big Picture", Life Magazine (December 1988)
Interviews
Misattributed to Meryl Streep (and widely disseminated on the Internet as of August/September 2014), this quote is allegedly a translation of a text by the author José Micard Teixeira, the original of which begins (in Portuguese): "Já não tenho paciência para algumas coisas, não porque me tenha tornado arrogante..."
Misattributed
“We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.”
“we can't change the game but rules can be adjusted”
Source: Sweetest song I know
Source: Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft
“A genius doesn't adjust his treatment of a theme to a tyrant's taste”
Source: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
On Functional Finance: (1943, pg.354) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=174849
“Mind is a flexible mirror, adjust it, to see a better world.”
Meditation:Insights and Inspirations (2010) https://books.google.com/books?id=s2ctBgAAQBAJ,
Source: 1960s, Strength to Love (1963), Ch. 2 : Transformed nonconformist
Wear and Tears (tableu of a ageless world)
Specters of Marx (1993)
Context: The time is out of joint. The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts. Old age or youth-one no longer counts in that way. The world has more than one age. We lack the measure of the measure. We no longer realize the wear, we no longer take account of it as of a single age in the progress of history. Neither maturation, nor crisis, nor even agony. Something else. What is happening is happening to age itself, it strikes a blow at the teleological order of history. What is coming, in which the untimely appears, is happening to time but it does not happen in time. Contretemps. The time is out of joint. Theatrical speech, Hamlet's speech before the theater of the world, of history, and of politics. The age is off its hinges. Everything, beginning with time, seems out of kilter, unjust, dis-adjusted. The world is going very badly, it wears as it grows, as the Painter also says at the beginning of Timon of Athens (which is Marx's play, is it not). For, this time, it is a painter's speech, as if he were speaking of a spectacle or before a tableau: "How goes the world?-It wears, sir, as it grows.
“We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.”
Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 9
Interview en-route to Iceland, March 24, 2005 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QryuMf8qZ0g
2000s
Schwitters (1921) in: Abstract Art, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson, London 1990, p. 68-69.
1920s
Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 13
Source: 1930s, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935), Ch. 7: The Case for Socialism
However, that wouldn't work in Poland or New York City, where the Jews are of an inferior strain, & so numerous that they would essentially modify the physical type.
Letter to Natalie H. Wooley (22 November 1934), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 77
Non-Fiction, Letters
Conversation of 1930
Similar to Wittgenstein's written notes of the "Big Typescript" published in Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993) edited by James Carl Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, p. 175: Philosophical problems can be compared to locks on safes, which can be opened by dialing a certain word or number, so that no force can open the door until just this word has been hit upon, and once it is hit upon any child can open it.
Personal Recollections (1981)
Source: The German Ideology (1845-1846), Vol. I, Part 1.
Letter to James F. Morton (18 January 1931), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 587
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.
Source: The Book of The Damned (1919), Ch. 1, part 4 at resologist.net
“Insanity — a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
As quoted in Wisdom for the Soul : Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 412; this might be a paraphrase, as the earliest occurrence of this phrase thus far located is in the form: "Ronald David Laing has shocked many people when he suggested in 1972 that insanity can be a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world." in Studii de literatură română și comparată (1984), by The Faculty of Philology-History at Universitatea din Timișoara. A clear citation to Laing's own work has not yet been found.
Disputed
"Price Flexibility and Output Stability: An Old Keynesian View" (1993)
Letter to James F. Morton (January 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 253
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.
1860s, First Inaugural Address (1861)
1860s, Fourth of July Address to Congress (1861)
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Life of Ramakrishna (1929)
Context: Of course, this entire fabric of Indian life stands solidly on faith, that is to say, on a slender and emotional hypothesis. But amid all the beliefs of Europe, and of Asia, that of the Indian Brahmins seems to me infinitely the most alluring. And the reason why I love the Brahmin more than the other schools of Asiatic thought is because it seems to me to contain them all. Greater than all European philosophies, it is even capable of adjusting itself to the vast hypotheses of modern science. Our Christian religions have tried in vain, when there were no other choice open to them, to adapt themselves to the progress of science. But after having allowed myself to be swept away by the powerful rhythm of Brahmin thought, along the curve or life, with its movement of alternating ascent and return, I come back to my own century, and while finding therein the immense projections of a new cosmogony, offspring of the genius of Einstein, or deriving freely from the discoveries, I yet do not feel that I enter a strange land. I yet can hear resounding still the cosmic symphony of all those planets which forever succeed each other, are extinguished and once more illumined, with their living souls, their humanities, their gods – according to the laws of the eternal To Become, the Brahmin Samsara – I hear Siva dancing, dancing in the heart of the world, in my own heart.
1860s, Allow the humblest man an equal chance (1860)
Context: For, whether we will or not, the question of Slavery is the question, the all absorbing topic of the day. It is true that all of us, and by that I mean, not the Republican party alone, but the whole American people, here and elsewhere, all of us wish this question settled, wish it out of the way. It stands in the way, and prevents the adjustment, and the giving of necessary attention to other questions of national house-keeping. The people of the whole nation agree that this question ought to be settled, and yet it is not settled. And the reason is that they are not yet agreed how it shall be settled. All wish it done, but some wish one way and some another, and some a third, or fourth, or fifth; different bodies are pulling in different directions, and none of them having a decided majority, are able to accomplish the common object.
1860s, Speeches to Ohio Regiments (1864), Speech to the One Hundred Sixty-fourth Ohio Regiment
Context: I say this in order to impress upon you, if you are not already so impressed, that no small matter should divert us from our great purpose. There may be some irregularities in the practical application of our system. It is fair that each man shall pay taxes in exact proportion to the value of his property; but if we should wait before collecting a tax to adjust the taxes upon each man in exact proportion with every other man, we should never collect any tax at all. There may be mistakes made sometimes; things may be done wrong while the officers of the Government do all they can to prevent mistakes. But I beg of you, as citizens of this great Republic, not to let your minds to carried off from the great work we have before us. This struggle is too large for you to be diverted from it by any small matter.
As A Man Thinketh (1902), Effect of Thought on Circumstances
Context: The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combinations of colours, which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts.
You will be, what you "will" to be.
Let failure find its false content,
In that poor word "environment,"
But spirit scorns it and is free.
When You Are Agitated
Autobiography of Swami Sivananda
2009
Source: Sweethearts
“In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty…”
As quoted in The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners (2004) by Geoff Tibballs, p. 264
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications
“To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”
“A hermit is simply a person to whom civilization has failed to adjust itself.”
“He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.”
Source: The Corrections
“Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.”
Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (1992).
“I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.”
March 25, 1933
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Context: I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.
“A well adjusted person is one who makes the same mistake twice without getting nervous.”
“When you can’t change the direction of the wind — adjust your sails”
Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
“Memory fades, memory adjusts, memory conforms to what we think we remember.”
Source: Blue Nights
2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget
2010s, The Deflation of the Academic Brand (2018)
1920s, Freedom and its Obligations (1924)
An Imposter Impersonator, p. 78.
The American Dream (2008)
Source: Politics and Structural Adjustment in a West-African Village (1990). AKUT, Uppsala universitet, p. 19; About villagers of Adjadja, Guinea-Bissau in the 1990s.
The Story of Lao Ting and the Luminous Insect
Kai Lung's Golden Hours (1922)
Source: Politics and Structural Adjustment in a West-African Village (1990). AKUT, Uppsala universitet, p. 20
Source: The Doctrine of the Mean
Leontief, quoted in: Carter, A.P. (1996), "Technology, Employment and the Distribution of Income: Leontief af 90," Economic Systems Research, Vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 315.
“I may sound a little black, but I'm really pretty well adjusted.”
Letter to Kay Menyers (17 March 1958), p. 109
1990s, The Proud Highway : The Fear and Loathing Letters Volume I (1997)
In an interview by Henry Geldzahler, 'Art International 1.', February 1964, p. 48
1950 - 1968
"Meditation: The How and the Why" (2003)