Ellsworth Huntington Quotes

The human organism inherits so delicate an adjustment to climate that, in spite of man's boasted ability to live anywhere, the strain of the frozen North eliminates the more nervous and active types of mind.

The mind-brain is lived only from a first-person perspective, and it is a dynamic, plastic organ that changes in relation to the environment.

Of course, Minneapolis, we think, 'Oh well, it's cold there, lethally cold.' But the reality is you adapt to weather... Humans are consummately adaptable creatures.

Physically, you never get used to the cold. It's cold! If it's cold, it's cold! And you go out there, and your body feels it, but I think mentally, living in it, it's not such a shock to you.

One of the coolest things to me about living in space was it really caused me to think about how the human body and mind can adapt to completely different environments.

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

Humans were built to look back; that's why we have that swivel joint in our necks

. . . by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

The human digestive and visual systems did clearly evolve over a very long period.

The human mind naturally adapts itself to the position it occupies.

Stress is something that's created in the mind, basically. It's how we look at things. So ovr greatest defense against stress is the ability to change ovr minds; to change ovr thinking.

The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.

Man is a tool-using animal.

A prison is confining to the body, but whether it affects the mind, depends entirely upon the mind.

Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven?

Does your mind feel more and more like teflon? Nothing sticks to it?

There is reason to believe that voluntary activity, more than highly developed intellect, distinguishes humans from the animals which stand closest to them.

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.

It is a misconception to think that during evolution humans sacrificed physical skill in exchange for intelligence: wielding one's body is a mental activity.

Biologically, man is still the great amateur of the animal kingdom; he is unique in his lack of anatomical and physiological specialization.

What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave?

Any time a body goes outside the environmental conditions for which it developed it has to acclimate.

There is a strange fact about the human mind, a fact that differentiates the mind sharply from the body. The body is limited in ways that the mind is not. One sign of this is that the body does not continue indefinitely to grow in strength and develop in skill and grace. By the time most people are thirty years old, their bodies are as good as they will ever be; in fact, many persons' bodies have begun to deteriorate by that time. But there is no limit to the amount of growth and development that the mind can sustain. The mind does not stop growing at any particular age.

The mind doth shape itself to its own wants, and can bear all things.

If I was getting harder, it was in response to the world around me.