Marcus Aurelius Quotes
Observe always that everything is the result of a change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them.
Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Translated by George Long, Dover Publications, 1997, p. 27.
See Heraclitus {436440} for the ancient Greek exposition of this idea.
See {436440} for another of his views on change.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. It was then, and still is common to refer to the results of evolution as “miracles” as Darwin had revealed the process but did not opine on the origin or creation of the process. With many religious people at the time a sensible dialogue and inquiry could be made of evolution so long as the possibility of a Supreme Being creating the mechanism of evolution remained open. Fundamentalists, however, insisted that the Bible stated that God made each of the species in its then current form and therefore they rejected even the possibility that God had created the evolutionary scheme which implemented his miracles.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and a Stoic philosopher. He was the last of the rulers known as the Five Good Emperors (a term coined some 13 centuries later by Niccolò Machiavelli), and the last emperor of the Pax Romana (27 BC to 180 AD), an age of relative peace and stability for the Roman Empire. He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161.
