E. O. Wilson Quotes

146 Sourced Quotes

We seem to be able to be fully comfortable only when the remainder of humanity can be labeled as members versus nonmembers.

E. O. Wilson
Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.

E. O. Wilson
This planet can be a paradise in the 22nd century.

E. O. Wilson
Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.

E. O. Wilson
The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.

E. O. Wilson
In early history phobias might have provided the extra margin needed to insure survival...

E. O. Wilson
Most kinds of aggressive behavior among members of the same species are responsive to crowding in the environment.

E. O. Wilson
That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.

E. O. Wilson
Who are we to destroy the planet's creation?

E. O. Wilson
Somewhere close I knew spear-nosed bats flew through the tree crowns in search of fruit, palm vipers coiled in ambush in the roots of orchids, jaguars walked the river's edge; around them eight hundred species of trees stood, more than are native to all of North America; and a thousand species of butterflies, 6 percent of the entire world fauna, waited for the dawn.

E. O. Wilson
Evolution on a large scale unfolds, like much of human history, as a succession of dynasties.

E. O. Wilson
The unsolved mysteries of the rain forest are formless and seductive. They are like unnamed islands hidden in the blank spaces of old maps, like dark shapes glimpsed descending the far wall of a reef into the abyss.

E. O. Wilson
Scientists, I believe, are divided into two categories: those who do science in order to be a success in life, and those who become a success in life in order to do science.

E. O. Wilson
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
Scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of philosophers and biologized.

E. O. Wilson
Man's destiny is to know, if only because societies with knowledge culturally dominate societies that lack it. Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness. They stay in thatched huts and die young.

E. O. Wilson
When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.

E. O. Wilson
No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system; if it were otherwise the whole world would pray continuously.

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
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
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
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
Our sense of wonder grows exponentially: the greater the knowledge, the deeper the mystery and the more we seek knowledge to create new mystery.

E. O. Wilson