Alfred Russel Wallace Quotes

I am thankful I can see much to admire in all religions. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

As well might it be said that, because we are ignorant of the laws by which metals are produced and trees developed, we cannot know anything of the origin of steamships and railways. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

The bird skins surely held answers to questions that scientist didn't yet know to ask, and they must be protected at all costs.
"If this is not done," he warned, "future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations. They will charge us with having culpably allowed the destruction of some of those records of Creation which we had it in our power to preserve."

quoted in The Feather Thief, Kirk Wallace Johnson ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

The foregoing considerations lead us to the very important conclusion, that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force; that matter, as popularly understood, does not exist, and is, in fact, philosophically inconceivable. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

It seems sad, that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions...while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands... we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balance relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy.

This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

Why do some die and some live? The answer was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted live. From the effects of disease the most healthy escaped; from enemies, the strongest, swiftest, or the most cunning; from famine, the best hunters or those with the best digestion; and so on. Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain-that is, the fittest would survive. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's "control" not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the wa ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Truth is born into this world only with pangs and tribulations, and every fresh truth is received unwillingly. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

I have since wandered among men of many races and many religions. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

Our mastery over the forces of nature has led to a rapid growth of population, and a vast accumulation of wealth; but these have brought with them such an amount of poverty and crime, and have fostered the growth of so much sordid feeling and so many fierce passions, that it may well be questioned, whether the mental and moral status of our population has not on the average been lowered, and whether the evil has not overbalanced the good. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

There might have been a hundred or a thousand life-bearing planets, had the course of evolution of the universe been a little different, or there might have been none at all. They would probably add, that, as life and man have been produced, that shows that their production was possible; and therefore, if not now then at some other time, if not here then in some other planet of some other sun, we should be sure to have come into existence; or if not precisely the same as we are, then something a little better or a little worse. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

I hold with Henry George, that at the back of every great social evil will be found a great political wrong. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

Civilisation has ever accompanied emigration and conquest - the conflict of opinion, of religion, or of race. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

In one of my latest conversations with Darwin he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive. Those who succeed in the race for wealth are by no means the best or the most intelligent, and it is notorious that our population is more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

I am decidedly of the opinion that in very many instances we can trace such a necessary connexion, especially among birds, and often with more complete success than in the case which I have here attempted to explain. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

Modification of form is admitted to be a matter of time. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

I fully agree with all that you say on the advantages of H. Spencer's excellent expression of 'the survival of the fittest.' This, however, had not occurred to me till reading your letter. It is, however, a great objection to this term that it cannot be used as a substantive governing a verb; and that this is a real objection I infer from H. Spencer continually using the words, natural selection.
(Letter to A. R. Wallace July 1866) ~ Charles Darwin

What birds can have their bills more peculiarly formed than the ibis, the spoonbill, and the heron? ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

There is a great deal more to evolutionary biology than survival of the fittest - although that's all anyone seems to remember. One of Darwin's contemporaries was Alfred Russel Wallace, who had even more profound lessons about evolution - that humans are social creatures. That we coevolve with other species as part of a fabric of interwoven and interdependent life-forms. The world isn't entirely about competition and dominance. And species that cooperate with others succeed better than those who do not. That's what civilization is, cooperation." "And ~ Daniel Suarez

To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

Mars, therefore, is not only uninhabited by intelligent beings such as Mr. Lowell postulates, but is absolutely uninhabitable. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

In less than eight years "The Origin of Species" has produced conviction in the minds of a majority of the most eminent living men of science. New facts, new problems, new difficulties as they arise are accepted, solved, or removed by this theory; and its principles are illustrated by the progress and conclusions of every well established branch of human knowledge. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

I slept very comfortably with half a dozen smoke-dried human skulls suspended over my head ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

If this is not done, future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

To the mass of mankind religion of some kind is a necessity. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

What we need are not prohibitory marriage laws, but a reformed society, an educated public opinion which will teach individual duty in these matters. ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

The white men in our colonies are too frequently the savages ~ Alfred Russel Wallace

Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense. ~ David Foster Wallace

Never, oh! never, nothing will die; The stream flows, The wind blows, The cloud fleets, The heart beats, Nothing will die. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

A profession that we are a nation "under God" is identical, for Establishment Clause purposes, to a profession that we are a nation "under Jesus," a nation "under Vishnu," a nation "under Zeus," or a nation "under no god," because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion. ~ Alfred Goodwin

Ast year's Best-Sex-Scene-in-a-film winner Vince Voyeur's real name turns out to be John LaForme. Rhetorical Q.: How, if one's real name was John LaForme, could that person possibly feel the need for a nom de guerre? ~ David Foster Wallace

Why doesn't he say something to her?
But I knew why. Because there's the creeping fear that these moments don't actually exist outside your own head. No eyes meet across a crowded room, no two people thing precisely the same thing, and if only one person actually has that moment, is it even really a moment at all?
We know this, so we say nothing. We avert our eyes, or pretend to be looking for change, we hope the other person will take the initiative, because we don't want to risk losing this feeling of excitement and possibilities and lust. It's too perfect. That little second of hope is worth something, possibly for ever, as we lie on out deathbeds, surrounded by our children, and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren, and we can't help but quickly give on last selfish, dying thought to what could have happened if we'd actually said hello to that girl in the Uggs selling CDs outside Nando's seventy-four years earlier. ~ Danny Wallace

Vanity is apt to inspire contempt, but that becomes immediately tempered by a gentler and more gracious feeling; for the vain man desires to win our approbation, and in this way he flatters us. ~ Arthur Alfred Lynch

The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me. ~ David Foster Wallace

People outdoors here just scuttle in vectors from air conditioning to air conditioning. The sun is a hammer. I can feel one side of my face start to cook. The blue sky is glossy and fat with heat, a few thin cirri sheared to blown strands like hair at the rims. ~ David Foster Wallace

Bertrand Russell had given a talk on the then new quantum mechanics, of whose wonders he was most appreciative. He spoke hard and earnestly in the New Lecture Hall. And when he was done, Professor Whitehead, who presided, thanked him for his efforts, and not least for 'leaving the vast darkness of the subject unobscured'. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

It is impossible to get the measure of what an individual can accomplish unless the responsibility is given him. ~ Alfred P. Sloan

If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.
~ Wallace Stegner

The return makes one love the farewell. ~ Alfred De Musset

It's one thing to have the respect of your peers in the business. Their opinions are not always verbalized but if you are doing the right thing you don't need validation. ~ Carlos Wallace

The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

How do you know when it's me?"
"Your footsteps are apologetic?"
"What does that mean?"
She turned, smiling wiping her hands on her long, black skirt. "It doesn't mean anything," she said. "Everybody else here just does what they want to do and doesn't think twice about it. But you're never sure. ~ Daniel Wallace

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I'm saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean. ~ David Foster Wallace

I am one of those who think, like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries. ~ Marie Curie

Speculating and predicting what lies beyond the boundary ins fascinating. Finding out is even more fascinating. ~ Wallace H. Tucker

Brandon, until this very moment, the world and the people in it have always been dark and incomprehensible to me, and I've tried to clear my way with logic and superior intellect, and you've thrown by own words right back in my face; you've given my words a meaning that I never dreamed of, and you tried to twist them into a cold logical excuse for your ugly murder!

Tonight you've made me ashamed of every concept I've ever had, of superior or inferior beings, but I thank you for that shame, because now I know that we're each of us a separate human being, Brandon, with the right to live and work and think as individuals, but with an obligation to the society that we live in. By what right do you dare say that there's a superior few to which you belong? By what right did you dare decide that that boy in there [he's referencing the dead body of "David," lying in a trunk in the middle of the room] was inferior and therefore could be killed?

Did you think you were God Brandon? Is that what you thought when you choked the life out of him? Is that what you thought when you served food from his grave! I don't know what you thought or what you are, but I know what you've done - YOU'VE MURDERED! You've strangled the life of a fellow human being who could live and love as you never could... and never will again! ~ Arthur Laurents

Just as we descend into our consciences to judge of actions which our minds can not weigh, can we not also search in ourselves for the feeling which gives birth to forms of thought, always vague and cloudy? ~ Alfred De Vigny

You get to decide what to worship. ~ David Foster Wallace

So listen
one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. There's another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice it's original height. ~ David Foster Wallace

Knowledge is always accompanied with accessories of emotion and purpose. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

RUSSEL. When he grows up I want to be able to point to him and say: "There goes my son -- the man". I want to live in a masculine culture.
BONGI. That's a contradiction in terms. ~ Valerie Solanas

I have a great many opinions about writing, but I'm afraid that all of them are unprintable ~ Alfred Lansing

The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info. ~ David Foster Wallace

1962 that "No data processing system, whether artificial or living, can process more than 2 x 1047 bits per second per gram of its mass," which means that a hypothetical supercomputer the size of the earth (= c. 6 x 1027 grams) grinding away for as long as the earth has existed (= about 1010 years, with c. 3.14 x 107 seconds/year) can have processed at most 2.56 x 2092 bits, which number is known as Bremermann's Limit. ~ David Foster Wallace

Philosophy asks the simple question: What is it all about? ~ Alfred North Whitehead

My heart, still full of her,
traveled over her face, and found her there no more ...
I had thought to myself that a woman unknown
had adopted by chance that voice and those eyes
and I let the chilly statue pass
looking athe skies ~ Alfred De Musset

But such is life, the silliest proverbs prove to be true, and when a man thinks, now it's all right, it's not all right by a longshot. Man proposes, God disposes, and there's always that last straw to break the camel's back. ~ Alfred Doblin

The big stars I felt a kinship with were never the romantic leads. It wasn't Steve McQueen or Robert Redford - it was people like Walter Matthau and Anthony Quinn. My big hero was Tommy Cooper. ~ Alfred Molina

It was the Greeks who turned math into an abstract system, a special symbolic language that allows people not just to describe the concrete world but to account for its deepest patterns and laws. ~ David Foster Wallace

Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

Perhaps it was the anticipation, that moment sustained by the drive home, when one is in a taxi with a stranger who is about to be transfigured into a lover,and there is an interval, as in music, when the chord of desire has been struck, and the chord of the fulfillment of desire hasn't; when everything remains suspended and anticipatory, and the snow falls through the air of a city whose ugliness is temporarily obscured, and the cab itself seems to exist inside a magical circle of quiet heat and togetherness and motion; and, I suppose, for that moment, it is beautiful: the snow, and everything. ~ Hayes Alfred

Do you ever have an idea for a story, or a character, or even a line of dialogue or something, and suddenly it seems like the whole world is brighter? Like everything opens up, and everything makes sense?" -Wallace ~ Francesca Zappia

Books are a social substitute; you read people who, at one level, you'd like to hang out with. [David Foster Wallace]'s writing self
it's most pronounced in his essays
was the best friend you'd ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style. ~ David Lipsky

I can't sleep without knowing there's hope. Half the night I waste in sighs. In a wakeful doze I sorrow. For the hands, for the lips ... the eyes. For the meeting of tomorrow. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

Getting old is like standing in a long, slow line. You wake up out of the shuffle and torpor only at those moments when the line moves you one step closer to the window. ~ Wallace Stegner

Maybe that was why another part of me
a very small part
had wanted to kiss Wallace then. Both sides of his mouth, between his brows, and every other place those stupid worry lines marred his expression. That part of me had wanted to hold him tight and give him the comfort I knew he couldn't ask for.
But that part terrified me the most. ~ Carrie Butler

So this purports to be a disease, alcoholism? A disease like a cold? Or like cancer? I have to tell you, I have never heard of anyone being told to pray for relief from cancer. Outside maybe certain very rural parts of the American South, that is. So what is this? You're ordering me to pray? Because I allegedly have a disease? I dismantle my life and career and entered nine months of low-income treatment for a disease, and I'm prescribed prayer? Does the word retrograde signify? Am I in a sociohistorical era I don't know about? What exactly is the story here? ~ David Foster Wallace

The laws of physics and chemistry must be the same in a crucible as in the larger laboratory of Nature. ~ Alfred Harker

People, then, who are sad, but who can't let themselves feel sad, or express it, the sadness, I'm trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who's sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant. Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she'd so very carefully repaired after the last incident. ~ David Foster Wallace

That distinctive singular stamp of himself is one of the main reasons readers come to love an author. The way you can just tell, often within a couple paragraphs, that something is by Dickens, or Chekhov, or Woolf, or Salinger, or Coetzee, or Ozick. The quality's almost impossible to describe or account for straight out - it mostly presents as a vibe, a kind of perfume of sensibility - and critics' attempts to reduce it to questions of "style" are almost universally lame. ~ David Foster Wallace

Act as if you know what you are talking about and people will assume that you do. Pretend you have no fear and you will appear confident to others. ~ Michael Wallace