E. O. Wilson Quotes

146 Sourced Quotes

The true evolutionary epic, retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic.

E. O. Wilson
To a considerable degree science consists in originating the maximum amount of information with the minimum expenditure of energy. Beauty is the cleanness of line in such formulations along with symmetry, surprise, and congruence with other prevailing beliefs.

E. O. Wilson
Common sense is merely unaided intuition, and unaided intuition is reasoning performed in the absense of instruments and the tested knowledge of science. Common sense tells us that massive satellites cannot hang suspended 36,000 kilometers above the one point on the earth's surface, but they do...

E. O. Wilson
For the naturalist every entrance into a wild environment rekindles an excitement that is childlike in spontaneity, often tinged with apprehension — in short, the way life ought to be lived, all the time.

E. O. Wilson
Today, thanks to the relentless advance of the science which Newton pioneered, God's immanence has been pushed to somewhere below the subatomic particles or beyond the farthest visible galaxy.

E. O. Wilson
There can be no purpose more enspiriting than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.

E. O. Wilson
An enduring environmental ethic will aim to preserve not only the health and freedom of our species, but access to the world in which the human spirit was born.

E. O. Wilson
Like the old god Proteus it [Darwinism] is endless in the form it takes and is therefore filled with the information of realized Nature.

E. O. Wilson
The foreign policy aim of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week.

E. O. Wilson
The newborn infant is now seen to be wired with awesome precision... This marvelous robot will be launched into the world under the care of its parents... But to what extent does the wiring of the neurons, so undeniably encoded in the genes, preordain the directions that social development will follow?

E. O. Wilson
The rise of Darwinism reminds us that a great scientific theory is like a sunrise. It illuminates the steeples of the unknown and then their dark hollows.

E. O. Wilson
The beginning of wisdom, as the Chinese say, is calling things by their right names.

E. O. Wilson
Humanists are the shamans of the intellectual tribe, wise men who interpret knowledge and transmits the folklore, rituals, and sacred texts. Scientists are the scouts and hunters. No one rewards a scientist for what he knows. Nobel Prizes and other trophies are bestowed for the new facts and theories he brings home to the tribe.

E. O. Wilson
If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people,

E. O. Wilson
Keep in mind that new ideas are commonplace, and almost always wrong. Most flashes of insight lead nowhere; statistically, they have a half-life of hours or maybe days. Most experiments to follow up the surviving insights are tedious and consume large amounts of time, only to yield negative or (worse!) ambiguous results.

E. O. Wilson
New knowledge is not science until it is made social. The scientific culture can be defined as new verifiable knowledge secured and distributed with fair credit meticulously given.

E. O. Wilson
Now to the heart of wonder. Because species diversity was created prior to humanity, and because we evolved within it, we have never fathomed its limits. As a consequence, the living world is the natural domain of the most restless and paradoxical part of the human spirit.

E. O. Wilson
A civilization able to envision God and to embark on the colonization of space will surely find the way to save the integrity of this planet and the magnificent life it harbors.

E. O. Wilson
This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms-folded them into its genes-and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady.

E. O. Wilson
Every species lives a life unique to itself, and every species dies a different way.

E. O. Wilson
Progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard.... let us not pretend to deny in our philosophy what we know in our hearts to be true.

E. O. Wilson
And so the search proceeds relentlessly for natural units until, like the true grail, they are found and all rejoice. Scientific fame awaits those who discover the lines of fracture and the processes by which lesser natural units are joined to create larger natural units.

E. O. Wilson
Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmland the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind.

E. O. Wilson
Whether fully aware of it or not, we human beings are immersed in a world of insects.

E. O. Wilson
Ecologists, like the organisms they study, cannot make nature conform to their perfect liking.

E. O. Wilson
In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism-beetle, moss, and so forth, is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Mozart symphony, or any other great work of art.

E. O. Wilson
Genius is the summed production of the many with the names of the few attached for easy recall.

E. O. Wilson
It's [the loss of species] like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

E. O. Wilson
These whispering denizens of the mind are sensed but rarely seen. They rustle the foliage, leave behind a pug mark filling with water and a scent, excite us for an instant and vanish. Most ideas are waking dreams that fade to an emotional residue.

E. O. Wilson
In our hearts we hope we will never discover everything. We pray there will always be a world like this one at whose edge I sat in darkness.

E. O. Wilson