E. O. Wilson Quotes

It may be that our cosmic curiosity... is a genetically-encoded force that we illuminate when we look up and wonder.

A scientist is in a sense a learned small boy. There is something of the scientist in every small boy. Others must outgrow it. Scientists can stay that way all their lives.

Curiosity is natural to the soul of man and interesting objects have a powerful influence on our affections.

I'm probably, like, the nosiest person you'll ever meet. Not in a rude way, but I like to be in the know.

All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves...

It's in our genes, we were built to wander.

the breed is more than the pasture. As you know, the cuckoo lays her eggs in any bird's nest; it may be hatched among blackbirds or robins or thrushes, but it is always a cuckoo. ... a man cannot deliver himself from his ancestors.

It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.

The history of the human race is a continual struggle from darkness into light. It is, therefore, to no purpose to discuss the use of knowledge; man wants to know, and when he ceases to do so, is no longer a man.

A man is the sum of his ancestors; to reform him you must begin with a dead ape and work downward through a million graves. He is like the lower end of a suspended chain; you can sway him slightly to the right or the left, but remove your hand and he falls into line with the other links.

No man of science wants merely to know. He acquires knowledge to appease his passion for discovery. He does not discover in order to know, he knows in order to discover.

The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.

The world fascinates me.

If homosexuality being inborn is what makes it acceptable, why does racism being inborn not make racism acceptable? … We are born that way. We don’t choose it. So shouldn’t it be acceptable, excuse - this is according to the way the left thinks about things.

The world that has made us can no longer contain us

I think I benefited from being equal parts ambitious and curious. And of the two, curiosity has served me best.

Instinct is like Nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.

The attempt to close the gap between what is known and what IS, is the temptation behind the apple in Genesis.

We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.

To be wise is to be eternally curious.

We ask [ of the computer ] not just about where we stand in nature, but about where we stand in the world of artefact. We search for a link between who we are and what we have made, between who we are and what we might create, between who we are and what, through our intimacy with our own creations, we might become.

Anyhow, all mankind's ideas and interests, all human aims and motives, are exhibited, fully formed, in a three-year-old child. The kid is just operating on a smaller scale and lacks the advantage of having made enormous soft-money campaign contributions to political candidates.

We're in a world now where it's not enough to be smart. You have to be curious.

No one can be free who has a thousand ancestors.

We cannot get to our knowledge because the world is too loud. And we tend to make it louder as we cry out in pain, pretending we are singing.