79 Flexibility Quotes

I wanted to be supportive of parents rather than to scold them. The book set out very deliberately to counteract some of the rigidities of pediatric tradition, particularly in infant feeding. It emphasized the importance of great differences between individual babies, of the need for flexibility and of the lack of necessity to worry constantly about spoiling.

Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms and since Jeet Kune Do has no style, it can fit in with all styles. As a result, Jeet Kune Do utilizes all ways and is bound by none and, likewise, uses any techniques which serve its end.

All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.

Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.

I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.

Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is left up to the rendering engine.

Fixed formation is bad. Study this well.

Of course I'm inconsistent! Only logicians and cretins are consistent!

Disneyland is like a piece of clay: If there is something I don't like, I'm not stuck with it. I can reshape and revamp.

'A teacher is never too smart to learn from his pupils. But while runners differ, basic principles never change. So it's a matter of fitting your current practices to fit the event and the individual. See, what's good for you might not be worth a darn for the next guy.'

As an attorney, I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather: the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it - very loose, the line of the law - so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are nearly always - short of blatant theft or cold-blooded murder - safely on the right side. That's a daunting thing to realize but true.

The essayist ... can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter - philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast...

My peculiarity is that I don't have a particular style of investing or, more exactly, I try to change my style to fit the conditions.

The only routine with me is no routine at all.

The mark of a moderate man is freedom from his own ideas. Tolerant like the sky, all-pervading like sunlight, firm like a mountain, supple like a tree in the wind, he has no destination in view and makes use of anything life happens to bring his way.

Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something. :-)

Odd that we think definitions are definitive. :-)

Eutrapelia. 'A happy and gracious flexibility,' Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians...lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners.

If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up.

Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless - like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

Finally, a Jeet Kune Do man who says Jeet Kune Do is exclusively Jeet Kune Do is simply not with it. He is still hung up on his self-closing resistance, in this case anchored down to reactionary pattern, and naturally is still bound by another modified pattern and can move within its limits. He has not digested the simple fact that truth exists outside all molds; pattern and awareness is never exclusive.

Using no way as way, having no limitation as limitation.

The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation-or a relationship.

Religion asks questions about morals, whereas science just asks questions about the natural world. But when people try to use religion to address the natural world, science pushes back on it, and religion has to accommodate the results. Beliefs can be permanent, but beliefs can also be flexible. Personally, if I find out my belief is wrong, I change my mind. I think that's a good way to live.

Second is the Water book. With water as the basis, the spirit becomes like water. Water adopts the shape of its receptacle, it is sometimes a trickle and sometimes a wild sea. ... If you master the principles of sword-fencing, when you freely beat one man, you beat any man in the world. The spirit of defeating a man is the same for ten million men. ... The principle of strategy is having one thing, to know ten thousand things.

Generally, I dislike fixedness in both long swords and hands. Fixedness means a dead hand. Pliability is a living hand. You must bear this in mind.

The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor-not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies 'out there' in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.

When it comes to politics, one has to do as one [does] at sea with a sailing ship... reach one's course having regard to prevailing winds.

Go with the flow..

The techniques, though they play an important role in the early stage, should not be too restrictive, complex or mechanical. If we cling to them, we will become bound by their limitation. Remember, you are expressing the technique, and not doing Technique number two, Stance three, Section four?

My thought is a tender leaf that sways in every direction and finds pleasure in its swaying. Your thought is an ancient dogma that cannot change you nor can you change it. My thought is new, and it tests me and I test it morn and eve. You have your thought and I have mine.

I always consider raisins optional.

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.

Man is the animal that draws lines which he himself then stumbles over. In the whole pattern of civilization there have been two tendencies, one toward straight lines and rectangular patterns and one toward circular lines. There are reasons, mechanical and psychological, for both tendencies. Things made with straight lines fit well together and save space. And we can move easily - physically or mentally - around things made with round lines. But we are in a straitjacket, having to accept one or the other, when often some intermediate form would be better.

It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.

Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.

The way that helps will not be the same; it changes according to the situation.

I hate definitions.