Konrad Lorenz
It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.Collection: Pet
'I don't need brains,' says the billionaire contemptuously. 'I'm brainy enough myself!' The broker cries out in desperation, 'What, in heaven's name, do you want?' 'Goodness,' is the answer.Collection: Brainy
We do not take humor seriously enough.Collection: Humor
Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.Collection: Knowledge
The bond with a true dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth will ever be.
I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man; it is we.
I believe that present day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive.
Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.
Evil, by definition, is that which endangers the good, and the good is what we perceive as a value.
Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.
Barking dogs occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot.
Whenever we find, in two forms of life that are unrelated to each other, a similarity of form or of behaviour patterns which relates to more than a few minor details, we assume it to be caused by parallel adaptation to the same life-preserving function.
There is indeed the possibility that the evolutionary process has, in gray antiquity, bred into us an excess of aggression.
I consider early childhood events as most essential to a man's scientific and philosophical development.
Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.
We had better dispense with the personification of evil, because it leads, all too easily, to the most dangerous kind of war: religious war.
The father-mother family with two children isolated in a city flat is already insufficient.
From a neighbour, I got a one-day-old duckling and found, to my intense joy, that it transferred its following response to my person. At the same time, my interest became irreversibly fixated on water fowl, and I became an expert on their behaviour even as a child.
Practically all animals which move fast in a homogeneous medium have found means of giving their body a streamlined shape, thereby reducing friction to a minimum.
Ethologists are often accused of drawing false analogies between animal and human behaviour. However, no such thing as a false analogy exists: an analogy can be more or less detailed and, hence, more or less informative.
In the course of evolution, it constantly happens that, independently of each other, two different forms of life take similar, parallel paths in adapting themselves to the same external circumstances.
I grew up in the large house and the larger garden of my parents in Altenberg. They were supremely tolerant of my inordinate love for animals.
When I was about ten, I discovered evolution by reading a book by Wilhelm Boelsche and seeing a picture of Archaeopteryx.
I owe undying gratitude to my patient parents.
The fidelity of a dog is a precious gift demanding no less binding moral responsibilities than the friendship of a human being.Collection: Friendship
The bond with a dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth can ever be.Collection: Dog
Philosophers are people who know less and less about more and more, until they know nothing about everything. Scientists are people who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.Collection: People
There is no faith which has never yet been broken, except that of a truly faithful dogCollection: Friendship
Most people have forgotten how to live with living creatures, with living systems and that, in turn, is the reason why man, whenever he comes into contact with nature, threatens to kill the natural system in which and from which he live.Collection: Animal
The competition between human beings destroys with cold and diabolic brutality... Under the pressure of this competitive fury we have not only forgotten what is useful to humanity as a whole, but even that which is good and advantageous to the individual. [...] One asks, which is more damaging to modern humanity: the thirst for money or consuming haste... in either case, fear plays a very important role: the fear of being overtaken by one's competitors, the fear of becoming poor, the fear of making wrong decisions or the fear of not being up to snuff...Collection: Play
The fidelity of a dog is a precious gift.Collection: Dog
Just thinking that my dog loves me more than I love him, I feel shame.Collection: Dog
The truth about an animal is far more exciting and altogether more beautiful than all the myths woven about it.Collection: Beautiful
All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering... tends instead to favor humanity's destruction.Collection: Men
All too willingly man sees himself as the centre of the universe, as something not belonging to the rest of nature but standing apart as a different and higher being. Many people cling to this error and remain deaf to the wisest command ever given by a sage, the famous "Know thyself" inscribed in the temple of Delphi.Collection: Men
Evil, by definition, is that which endangers the good, and the good is that which we perceive as a value.Collection: Evil
...he who has seen the intimate beauty of nature cannot tear himself away from it again. He must become either a poet or a naturalist and, if his eyes are keen and his powers of observation sharp enough, he may well become both.Collection: Nature
All living beings have received their weapons through the same process of evolution that moulded their impulses and inhibitions; for the structural plan of the body and the system of behaviour of a species are parts of the same whole.... Wordsworth is right: there is only one being in possession of weapons which do not grow on his body and of whose working plan, therefore, the instincts of his species know nothing and in the usage of which he has no correspondingly adequate inhibition.Collection: Behaviour
Man appears to be the missing link between anthropoid apes and human beings.Collection: Science
Humor and knowledge are the two great hopes of our culture.Collection: Humor
The appeal of the cat lies in the very fact that she has formed no close bond with [man], that she has the uncompromising independence of a tiger or a leopard while she is hunting in his stables and barns: that she still remains mysterious and remote when she is rubbing herself gently against the legs of her mistress or purring contentedly in front of the fire.Collection: Lying
I believe that present day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive driveCollection: Believe
A man sufficiently gifted with humor is in small danger of succumbing to flattering delusions about himself, because he cannot help perceiving what a pompous ass he would become if he did.Collection: Men
Visualize yourself confronted with the task of killing, one after the other, a cabbage, a fly, a fish, a lizard, a guinea pig, a cat, a dog, a monkey and a baby chimpanzee. In the unlikely case that you should experience no greater inhibitions in killing the chimpanzee than in destroying the cabbage or the fly, my advice to you is to commit suicide at your earliest possible convenience, because you are a weird monstrosity and a public danger.Collection: Suicide
The instinctive need to be the member of a closely knit group fighting for common ideals may grow so strong that it becomes inessential what these ideals are.Collection: Strong
The attitude of the true scientist towards the real limits of human understanding was unforgettably impressed on me in early youth by the obviously unpremeditated words of a great biologist; Alfred Kuhn finished a lecture to the Austrian Academy of Science with Goethe 's words, "It is the greatest joy of the man of thought to have explored the explorable and then calmly to revere the inexplorable." After the last word he hesitated, raised his hand in repudiation and cried, above the applause, "No, not calmly, gentlemen; not calmly!Collection: Attitude
I am convinced that of all the people on the two sides of the great curtain, the space pilots are the least likely to hate each other. Like the late Erich von Holst, I believe that the tremendous and otherwise not quite explicable public interest in space flight arises from the subconscious realization that it helps to preserve peace. May it continue to do so!Collection: Hate
The human mind, in taking us down the path of technocracy, has become the adversary of life itself and collaterally the adversary of the human soul.Collection: Soul
If you confine yourself to this Skinnerian technique, you study nothing but the learning apparatus and you leave out everything that is different in octopi, crustaceans, insects and vertebrates. In other words, you leave out everything that makes a pigeon a pigeon, a rat a rat, a man a man, and, above all, a healthy man healthy and a sick man sick.Collection: Learning