E. O. Wilson Quotes

192 quotes in 2677 categories

• The growth of a naturalist is like the growth of a musician or athlete: excellence for the talented, lifelong enjoyment for the rest, benefit for…
• Thirty trillion dollars worth of services, scot-free to humanity, every year.
• Biophilia: the innate pleasure from living abundance and diversity as manifested by the human impulse to imitate Nature with gardens.
• Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings. About the ambitious pursuit of knowledge, alluding to…
• Biophilia, if it exists, and I believe it exists, is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.
• Known as the biosphere to scientists and as the creation to theologians, all of life together consists of a membrane around earth so thin that…
• No one knows the diversity in the world, not even to the nearest order of magnitude. ... We don't know for sure how many species…
• The cutting of primeval forest and other disasters, fueled by the demands of growing human populations, are the overriding threat to biological diversity everywhere.
• The worst thing that will probably happen-in fact is already well underway-is not energy depletion, economic collapse, conventional war, or the expansion of totalitarian governments.…
• Overall, the human brain is the most complex object known in the universe - known, that is, to itself.
• The time has come to link ecology to economic and human development. When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not…
• [The natural world cleans water, pollinates plants and provides pharmaceuticals, among many other gifts.] Thirty trillion dollars worth of services, scot-free to humanity, every year.
• Science is not marginal. Like art, it is a universal possession of humanity, and scientific knowledge has become a vital part of our species' repertory.…
• Now when you cut a forest, an ancient forest in particular, you are not just removing a lot of big trees and a few birds…
• [Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].
• No species ... possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history ... The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and…
• We are compelled to drive toward total knowledge, right down to the levels of the neuron and the gene. When we have progressed enough to…
• From the freedom to explore comes the joy of learning. From knowledge acquired by personal initiative arises the desire for more knowledge. And from mastery…
• In fact, nothing in science as a whole has been more firmly established by interwoven factual information, or more illuminating than the universal occurrence of…
• The genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the…

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