Biophilia Quotes

“How lucky country children are in these natural delights that lie ready to their hand! Every season and every plant offers changing joys. As they meander along the lane that leads to our school all kinds of natural toys present themselves for their diversion. The seedpods of stitchwort hang ready for delightful popping between thumb and finger, and later the bladder campion offers a larger, if less crisp, globe to burst. In the autumn, acorns, beechnuts, and conkers bedizen their path, with all their manifold possibilities of fun. In the summer, there is an assortment of honeys to be sucked from bindweed flowers, held fragile and fragrant to hungry lips, and the tiny funnels of honeysuckle and clover blossoms to taste.”
― Miss Read, Village Diary

“To experience biophilia is to love a diversity that, as limitless as it is fragile, both haunts us and fills us with hope. ”
― Adam Leith Gollner, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession

“Tiko has taught me, a sometimes headstrong and often ferociously independent woman, the importance of interdependence, the importance of taking care, and the importance of being cared for. It's a necessary part of being human and being connected to the world around us that we realize and acknowledge our vulnerability and the vulnerability of all creatures, and that we act in accord with that knowledge. It is critical that we allow the empathetic and altruistic part of ourselves to be the guiding force behind the way that we conduct our lives, whether we give to those less fortunate than ourselves, take care of the magnificent creatures that share our world, work tirelessly to preserve native habitat or separate each strand of an unruly mass of hair so gently that we do not wake our loved one as she sleeps.”
― Joanna Burger, The Parrot Who Owns Me: The Story of a Relationship

“If the ego were to disappear, or rather, to be seen as a useful fiction, there would no longer be the duality of subject and object, experiencer and experience. There would simply be a continuous, self-moving stream of experiencing, without the sense either of an active subject who controls it or of a passive subject who suffers it. The thinker would be no more than the series of thoughts, and the feeler no more than the feelings.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“Psychologist Erich Fromm coined the term ["biophilia"] in 1964 as a way of describing the innate attraction to processes of life and growth.”
― Adam Leith Gollner, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession

“They travel long distances to stroll along the seashore, for reasons they can't put into words.”
― Edward O. Wilson

“My sense of kinship with this world is not only with its obviously sympathetic and and beautiful aspects, but also with the horrendous and strange. For I have found that the monstrous and inhuman aspects of fish and insects and reptiles are not so much in them as in me. They are external embodiments of my natural creeps and shudders at the thought of pain and death.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“[T]he complexity of nature is not innate but consequence of the instruments used to handle it. There is nothing complex about walking, breathing, and circulating one's blood. Living organisms have developed these functions without without thinking about them at all. The circulation of the blood becomes complex only when stated in physiological terms, that is, when understood by means of a conceptual model constructed of the kind of simple units which conscious attention requires.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“Feeble as it may be today, the feeling of sharing a common destiny with other living things is embed­ded in the human psyche. Those who struggle to conserve what is left of the environment are moved by the love of living things, biophilia, the frail bond of feeling that ties humankind to the Earth.”
― John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

“[W]hen I leave the Church and the city behind and go out under the sky, when I am with the birds, [...] with the clouds, [...] and with the oceans, [...] I cannot feel Christianity because I am in a world which grows from within. I am simply incapable of feeling its life as coming from above[.] More exactly, I cannot feel that its life comes from Another, from one who is qualitatively and spiritually external to all that lives and grows. On the contrary, I feel this whole world to be moved from the inside, and from an inside so deep that it is my inside as well, more truly I than my surface consciousness.”
― Alan W. Watts

“[T]he complexity of nature is not innate but a consequence of the instruments used to handle it. There is nothing complex about walking, breathing, and circulating one's blood. Living organisms have developed these functions without without thinking about them at all. The circulation of the blood becomes complex only when stated in physiological terms, that is, when understood by means of a conceptual model constructed of the kind of simple units which conscious attention requires.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“The natural world seems a marvel of complexity, requiring a vastly intricate intelligence to create and govern it, just because we have represented it to ourselves in the clumsy 'notation' of thought.
[...] Understanding nature by means of thought is like trying to make out the contours of an enormous cave with the aid of a small flashlight casting a bright but very thin beam. The path of the light and the series of 'spots' over which it has passed must be retained in memory, and from this record the general appearance of the cave must laboriously be reconstructed.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“Who are we to destroy the planet's Creation? Each species around us is a masterpiece of evolution, exquisitely adapted to its environment. Species existing today are thousands to millions of years old. Their genes, having been tested by adversity over countless generations, engineer a staggeringly complex mix of biochemical devices that promote the survival and reproduction of the organisms carrying them.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

“The forest at night is an experience in sensory deprivation most of the time, black and silent as the midnight zone of a cave.
Life is out there in expected abundance. The jungle teems, but in a manner mostly beyond the reach of the human senses. Ninety-nine percent of the animals find their way by chemical trails laid over the surface, puffs of odor released into the air or water, and scents diffused out of little hidden glands and into the air downwind.
Animals are masters of this chemical channel, where we are idiots. But we are geniuses of the audiovisual channel, equaled in this modality only by a few odd groups (whales, monkeys, birds). So we wait for the dawn, while they wait for the fall of darkness; and because sight and sound are the evolutionary prerequisites of intelligence, we alone have come to reflect on such matters as Amazon nights and sensory modalities.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

“The best of science doesn't consist of mathematical models and experiments, as textbooks make it seem. Those come later. It springs fresh from a more primitive mode of thought, wherein the hunter's mind weaves ideas from old facts and fresh metaphors and the scrambled crazy images of things recently seen.
To move forward is to concoct new patterns of thought, which in turn dictate the design of the models and experiments.
Easy to say, difficult to achieve.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

“Genius is the summed production of the many with the names of the few attached for easy recall, unfairly so to other scientists.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

“The unknown and prodigious are drugs to the scientific imagination, stirring insatiable hunger with a single taste.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

“Biodiversity [...] is the key to the maintenance of the world as we know it.
Life in a local site struck down by a passing storm springs back quickly because enough diversity still exists. Opportunistic species evolved for just such an occasion rush in to fill the spaces. They entrain the succession that circles back to something resembling the original state of the environment.
This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms —folded them into its genes — and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

“When a big, new, persuasive idea is proposed, an army of critics soon gathers and tries to tear it down. Such a reaction is unavoidable because, aggressive yet abiding by the rules of civil discourse, this is simply how scientists work.
It is further true that, faced with adversity, proponents will harden their resolve and struggle to make the case more convincing. Being human, most scientists conform to the psychological Principle of Certainty, which says that when there is evidence both for and against a belief, the result is not a lessening but a heightening of conviction on both sides.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

“[A] new idea will, like mother earth, take some serious hits. If good it will survive, probably in modified form. If bad it will die, usually at the time of death or retirement of the last original proponent.
As Paul Samuelson once said of the science of economics: funeral by funeral, theory advances.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

“I believe in human biophilia. I believe that an affinity with other living things, a desire to be near and connect with them, and a love of natural beauty are in our DNA. How to square this, though, with what anyone living in our day can see: the human drive to make the world increasingly ugly, and in the end, to trash it.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables