90 Quotes by Konrad Lorenz

I believe that both art and the human striving for cognitive comprehension are manifest forms of the grand game in which nothing more is stipulated than the game’s rules; both art and actively solicited perceptions are but special cases of the recurring creative act to which we owe our existence.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.

It ought to be realized by all dog owners that obesity shortens a dog’s life quite considerably, a life which is much too short anyhow.

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

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.

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”.

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?

From a neighbour, I got a one-day-old duckling and found, to my intense joy, that it transferred its following response to my person. At the same time, my interest became irreversibly fixated on water fowl, and I became an expert on their behaviour even as a child.

Whenever we find, in two forms of life that are unrelated to each other, a similarity of form or of behaviour patterns which relates to more than a few minor details, we assume it to be caused by parallel adaptation to the same life-preserving function.