Fixed Action Patterns

Famous quotes containing the words fixed, action and/or patterns:

    Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the straying of the planets and the magnificence of the fixed stars.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    Thought is the seed of action; but action is as much its second form as thought is its first.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sunflecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)