The Origins of Creativity Quotes

“accordingly and accurately from one exchange to the next. The most successful member of a stable society has a strong sense of empathy. It can see what others see, feel what they feel, and gauge its response with precision—when to advance and when to retire, whom to groom and whom to avoid, whom to challenge and whom to placate. Empathy, the intelligence to read the feelings of others and predict their actions, is not the same as sympathy, the emotional concern felt for another’s plight combined with a desire to provide help and relief. It is closely”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity

“Science owns the warrant to explore everything deemed factual and possible, but the humanities, borne aloft by both fact and fantasy, have the power of everything not only possible but also conceivable.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity

“Meanwhile, because humanity is still swept along by animal passions in a digitalized global world, and because we are conflicted between what we are and what we wish to become, and because we are drowning in information and starved for wisdom, it would seem appropriate to return philosophy to its once esteemed position, this time as the center of a humanistic science and a scientific humanities.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity

“To express this increasingly complex subject as succinctly as possible, the ancestors of our species developed the brain power to connect with other minds and to conceive unlimited time, distance, and potential outcomes. This infinite reach of imagination, put quite simply, is what made us great.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity

“The main shortcoming of humanistic scholarship is its extreme anthropocentrism. Nothing, it seems, matters in the creative arts and critical humanistic analyses except as it can be expressed as a perspective of present-day literate culture. Everything tends to be weighed by its immediate impact on people. Meaning is drawn from that which is valued exclusively in human terms. The most important consequence is that we are left with very little to compare with the rest of life. The deficit shrinks the ground on which we can understand and judge ourselves.”
― Edward O. Wilson , The Origins of Creativity

“Like the sunlight and the firelight that guided our birth, we need a unified humanities and science to construct a full and honest picture of what we truly are and what we can become.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity

“Not least for those who are called foreigners, for they are not foreigners. For, while the various segments of the Earth give different people a different country, the whole compass of this world gives all people a single country, the entire Earth, and a single home, the world.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity

“it is easy to forget that religious art is dedicated to the regnant creation story, that deviation from the story is not permitted, and that brutal wars have been fought to replace one story over another. The secular humanities, to put the matter plainly, must compete with organized religions and religion-like ideologies for attention and volunteer public funding. The first is free to explore and innovate; the other is not.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity

“Timothy Beatley in Biophilic Cities: Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning (2011)”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity

“Annie Dillard was a pioneer in her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Among other notable examples are David M. Carroll’s Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook (2009); David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen (2012); and Dave Goulson’s A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm (2015).”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity

“Serious art, whether expressed in score, script, or image, seizes you on first encounter. It then holds and distracts you long enough to lead your mind away and through the remainder of its content—perhaps to understand the whole intended meaning, perhaps to revisit a fragment for sheer pleasure. The overall feel of a creative work (call it the signature) may come at the beginning or at the end, and sometimes only after the experience when it is stored in long-term memory and is the first thought that comes to the conscious mind upon recall.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity

“Meanwhile, it needs to be recognized, and talked about more frankly, that for philosophy the elephant in the kitchen is organized religion. More precisely, the understanding of human condition often foretold by the blending of science and religion is inhibited by the intervention of supernatural creation stories, each defining a separate tribe. It is one thing to hold and share the elevated spiritual values of theological religion, with a belief in the divine and trust in the existence of an afterlife. It is another thing entirely to adopt a particular supernatural creation story. Faith in a creation story gives comforting membership in a tribe. But it bears stressing that not all creation stories can be true, no two can be true, and most assuredly, all are false. Each is sustained by blind tribalistic faith alone.

The study of religion is an essential part of the humanities. It should nonetheless be studied as an element of human nature, and the evolution thereof, and not, in the manner of Christian bible colleges and Islamic madaris, a manual for the promotion of a faith defined by a particular creation story.”
― Edward O. Wilson, The Origins of Creativity