Quotes from Konrad Lorenz

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

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

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

I have found the missing link between the higher ape and civilized man: It is we.

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

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

The missing link between animals and the real human being is most likely ourselves.

Every scientist should, after all, regard it as his duty to tell the public, in a generally intelligible way, about what he is doing

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.

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.

Every danger loses some of its terror once its causes are understood.

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

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

But man should abstain from judging his innocently cruel fellow creatures, for even if nature sometimes "shrieks against his creed", what pain does he himself not inflict upon the living creatures that he hunts for pleasure and not for food?

No such thing as a false analogy exists: an analogy can be more or less detailed and hence more or less informative.

Human aggression is instinctual. Humans have not evolved any ritualised aggression-inhibiting mechanisms to ensure the survival of the species. For this reason man is considered a very dangerous animal.

It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.

Az a hétköznapi tény, hogy a kutyám jobban szeret engem, mint én Å't, egyszer?en letagadhatatlan, és engem mindig bizonyos szégyennel tölt el.

In the almost film-like flitting-by of modern life, a man needs something to tell him, from time to time, that he is still himself, and nothing can give him this assurance in so comforting a manner as the "four feet trotting behind".

Puesto que el que contempla con sus ojos la belleza, no es ya tributario de la muerte, como dice Platen, sino de la Naturaleza, cuya belleza ha comprendido. Y si sus ojos sirven realmente para ver, llegará a ser, inexcusablemente, naturalista.

Cuán reconocido estaría a mi destino con tal de que en mi vida hubiese logrado abrir un solo sendero, que, varias generaciones después, siguiera siendo pisado por seres humanos, y cuánto más si dejara un algo que en un futuro lejano ayudara también a otros seres humanos, fueran quienes fuesen, a "elevarse un poco hacia las alturas"!

Compare el centro antiguo de cualquier ciudad de Europa con sus modernos suburbios que proliferan por el campo. A continuación, compare la sección histológica de un tejido orgánico sano con la de un tumor maligno ¡Encontraremos analogías sorprendentes!

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