Fixed Action Patterns

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

    Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart’s blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.
    —F.H. (Francis Herbert)

    Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    I’ve begun to appreciate the generational patterns that ripple out from our lives like stones dropped in water, pulsing outward even after we are gone. Although we have but one childhood, we relive it first through our children’s and then our grandchildren’s eyes.
    Anne Cassidy (20th century)