216 Quotes by Frans de Waal

"it's hard to fool an ape. One reason for that is the absence of distraction by the spoken word. We attach such importance to verbal communication that we lose track of what our bodies say about us."

"The reality is that we are bodies born from other bodies, bodies feeding other bodies, bodies having sex with other bodies, bodies seeking a shoulder to lean or cry on, bodies traveling long distances to be close to other bodies, and so on. Would life be worth living without these connections and the emotions they arouse? How happy would we be, especially given that happiness, too, is an emotion?"

"Our societies probably work best if they mimic as closely as possible the small-scale communities of our ancestors. We certainly did not evolve to live in cities with millions of people where we bump into strangers everyone we go, are threatened by them in dark streets, sit next to them in the bus, and give them the finger in traffic jams."

"Emotions belong as much to the body as to the mind."

"It is said that man is wolf to man. I find this very unfair to wolves."

"I felt like a toilet frog during the last three decades of the preceding century. (38)"

"Ironically, torture requires empathy, too, in the sense that one cannot deliberately inflict pain without realizing what is painful."

"Since we routinely express ideas and feelings in language, we may be forgiven for assigning a role to it, but isn't it remarkable how often we struggle to find our words? It's not that we don't know what we thought or felt, but we just can't put our verbal finger on it. This would of course be wholly unnecessary if thoughts and feelings were linguistic products to begin with. In that case, we'd expect a waterfall of words!"

"If faith makes people buy an entire package of myths and values without asking too many questions, scientists are only slightly better."

"We are so logic-driven that we can't stand the absence of it."