Top 75 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man; it is we.

We had better dispense with the personification of evil, because it leads, all too easily, to the most dangerous kind of war: religious war.

We do not take humor seriously enough.

When I was about ten, I discovered evolution by reading a book by Wilhelm Boelsche and seeing a picture of Archaeopteryx.

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.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.

There is indeed the possibility that the evolutionary process has, in gray antiquity, bred into us an excess of aggression.

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.

I owe undying gratitude to my patient parents.

The father-mother family with two children isolated in a city flat is already insufficient.

Barking dogs occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot.

I consider early childhood events as most essential to a man's scientific and philosophical development.

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.

'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.

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.

Evil, by definition, is that which endangers the good, and the good is what we perceive as a value.

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.

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

The bond with a true dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth will ever be.

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.

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.

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.

I believe that present day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive.

The distance at which all shooting weapons take effect screens the killer against the stimulus sensation which would otherwise activate his killing inhibitions. The deep, emotional layers of our personality simply do not register the fact that the crooking of the finger to release a shot tears the entrails of another man.

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.

The fidelity of a dog is a precious gift.

...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.

I believe-and human psychologists, particularly psychoanalysts should test this-that present-day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive. It is more than probable that the evil effects of the human aggressive drives, explained by Sigmund Freud as the results of a special death wish, simply derive from the fact that in prehistoric times intra-specific selection bred into man a measure of aggression drive for which in the social order today he finds no adequate outlet.

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!

In science, new ideas are at first completely neglected, later fiercely attacked, and finally regarded as well known.

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.

One of the most dangerously vicious circles menacing the continued existence of all mankind arises through that grim striving for the highest possible position within the ranked order, in other words, the reckless pursuit of power which combines with an insatiable greed of neurotic proportions that the results of acquired power confer.

Hatred of humanity and love of animals make a very bad combination.

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.

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.

Scientific truth is universal, because it is only discovered by the human brain and not made by it, as art is.

The bond with a dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth can ever be.

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.

The fidelity of a dog is a precious gift demanding no less binding moral responsibilities than the friendship of a human being.

I believe that present day civilized man suffers from insufficient discharge of his aggressive drive

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.

The neuro-physiological organization which we call instinct functions in a blindly mechanical way, particularly apparent when its function goes wrong.

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.

It ought to be realized by all dog owners that obesity shortens a dog's life quite considerably, a life which is much too short anyhow.

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

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.

Man appears to be the missing link between anthropoid apes and human beings.

The truth about an animal is far more exciting and altogether more beautiful than all the myths woven about it.

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...

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.

The rushed existence into which industrialized, commercialized man has precipitated himself is actually a good example of an inexpedient development caused entirely by competition between members of the same species. Human beings of today are attacked by so-called manager diseases, high blood pressure, renal atrophy, gastric ulcers, and torturing neuroses: they succumb to barbarism because they have no more time for cultural interests.

Just thinking that my dog loves me more than I love him, I feel shame.

Evil, by definition, is that which endangers the good, and the good is that which we perceive as a value.

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.

Humor and knowledge are the two great hopes of our culture.

Man has been driven out of the paradise in which he could trust his instincts.

Barking dogs may occasionally bite, but laughing men hardly ever shoot!

There is no faith which has never yet been broken, except that of a truly faithful dog

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.