Top 75 Quotes & Sayings by Konrad Lorenz - Page 2

All scientific knowledge to which man owes his role as master of the world arose from playful activities.

Nothing can better express the feelings of the scientist towards the great unity of the laws of nature than in Immanuel Kant's words: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing awe: the stars above me and the moral law within me."... Would he, who did not yet know of the evolution of the world of organisms, be shocked that we consider the moral law within us not as something given, a priori, but as something which has arisen by natural evolution, just like the laws of the heavens?

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

I would rather have a Scot come from Scotland togovern the people of this kingdom well and justly, than that you should govern them ill in the sight of all the world.

In nature we find not only that which is expedient, but also everything which is not so inexpedient as to endanger the existence of the species.

The scientist knows very well that he is approaching ultimate truth only in an asymptotic curve and is barred from ever reaching it; but at the same time he is proudly aware of being indeed able to determine whether a statement is a nearer or a less near approach to the truth.

The human soul is very much older than the human mind.

I see the creative accomplishments of which highly gifted humans are capable as special cases of the universal creative process, that game played by everyone against everyone else, from which wells up all that has never been before.

The cat is a wild animal that inhabits the homes of humans.

Natural selection does not give any preference at all to anything that, in the long run, could be advantageous for the species but blindly rewards everything that, momentarily, affords greater procreative success.

More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind.

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!

Few animals display their mood via facial expressions as distinctly as cats.

Every mutation through a new combination of genetic factors that provides the organism with a new opportunity for coming to terms with the conditions of its environment signifies no more and no less than that new information about this environment has got into that organic system. Adaptation is essentially a cognitive process.

I believe that both art and the human striving for cognitive comprehension are manifest forms of the grand game in which nothing more is stipulated than the game's rules; both art and actively solicited perceptions are but special cases of the recurring creative act to which we owe our existence.