David Suzuki Quotes

Every seed is awakened, and all animal life.

A seed, after all, is an embryo, a potential plant waiting for its moment to grow. It has what it needs to begin. But it can also put itself on pause. It can wait.

I am a student of evolution and adaptation.

To survive and even thrive in a changing world, nature offers another great lesson: the survivors are those who at the least adapt to change, or even better learn to benefit from change and grow intellectually and personally. That means careful listening and constant learning.

The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind.

It is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.

The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit, and they do it hardly, or with tropical luxuriance, as the rain admits. ... One hopes the land may breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to 'try,' but to do.

It is part of the fundamental impulse in all living things to reach for light, part of the indomitable will to see.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.

Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.

You must change in order to survive.

To sustain longevity, you have to evolve.

If nature offers no home, then we must make a home one way or another. The only question is how.

The laws of nature are structured so that we grow and change, and get to experience the full spectrum of biological existence.

You might think that after thousands of years of coming up too soon and getting frozen, the crocus family would have had a little sense knocked into it.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.

In October, 1838, … I happened to read for amusement Malthus on population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continuous observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work

It is not the strongest of the species that survives. Nor is it the most intelligent. It is the members of the species that are most adaptive to change.

We have to look for opportunities if we're going to survive the next 50 years. We can't depend on what we have now.

Intelligence seems to blossom in the barest ground.

I'm inherently a chameleon... to not evolve is to not live.

I've come to learn from my own experiences and those around me that it's not about survival of the fittest but about who can adapt the best to change.