216 Quotes by Frans de Waal

Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognitions of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.

Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognition of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.

The power of autobiographical memories lies in their specificity. Colourful and alive, they can be actively called up and dwelled upon. They are reconstructions - which us why they are sometimes false - yet so powerful that they are accompanied by an extraordinary sense of their correctness.

I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later—or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!

La comunicación permite a los miembros de una especie reunirse y coordinar sus vidas tanto en un sentido positivo, por ejemplo, en las tareas cooperativas de las abejas o de las jaurías de perros salvajes, como en un sentido negativo, por ejemplo, cuando un ruiseñor macho canta a pleno pulmón para mantener a los rivales fuera de su territorio.

[T]he term 'nonhuman' grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something. Poor things, they are nonhuman! When students embrace this jargon in their writing, I cannot resist sarcastic corrections in the margin saying that for completeness's sake, they should add that the animals they are talking about are also nonpenguin, nonhyena, and a whole lot more.

Primates arouse a certain nervousness because they show us ourselves in a brutally honest light, reminding us,.....that we are mere 'naked apes.

If people laugh at primates at the zoo, they do so, I suspect, precisely because they're unsettled by the mirror held up to them.

If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?