E. O. Wilson Thinking Quotations

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

His pass blocking has a chance to really be good. Fundamentally for a young kid, he's pretty natural. But when you're thinking about your assignments all the time, you go the wrong way or you don't recognize it as quickly or you take a poor angle and you get beat because you're just in a bad position.

We've been thinking of stuff to say that's funny all day and we've come up with nothing.

The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper

I think history has shown that the worst way to [try to] bring people over and actually change public opinion is by insult and applied degradation of them.

To know how scientists engage in visual imagery is to understand how they think creatively.

Without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences... humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish born in a deep shallowed pool. Wondering and restless, longing to reach out, they think about the world outside. They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above , and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong because the world is too remote from ordinary experience to be merely imagined.

The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding. Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.

Human beings function better if they are deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a disinterested objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey.

It often occurs to me that if, against all odds, there is a judgmental God and heaven, it will come to pass that when the pearly gates open, those who had the valor to think for themselves will be escorted to the head of the line, garlanded, and given their own personal audience.

Most people believe they know how they themselves think, how others think too, and even how institutions evolve. But they are wrong. Their understanding is based on folk psychology, the grasp of human nature by common sense ¾ defined (by Einstein) as everything learned to the age of 18 ¾ shot through with misconceptions, and only slightly advanced over ideas employed by the Greek philosophers

I think we will make it. Because one quality people have - certainly Americans have it - is that they can adapt when they see necessity staring them in the face. What to avoid is what someone once called the definition of hell: truth realized too late.

We don't know nearly enough about the complexities of Nature. If we think we can eliminate natural ecosystems and substitute prosthetic devices, i.e. clean air or water with fusion energy - we are kidding ourselves.

I think that's my nature, to want to bring people together rather than to try to bombard them into agreement.

That's the way to get young people. Once they see there are wonderful things to hunt for, to rediscover a species that was thought to be extinct or is extremely rare, to be the first to see a nest, to discover a new species unsuspected close to your home - these are things, I think, with a little education and excitement and the right kind of natural history would actually start a movement that makes going back to nature a profitable adventure.

Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.

I just started thinking about her first day of kindergarten. It's just amazing to see her all grown up.