Alfred Russel Wallace quotes

Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist, explorer, and biologist, best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution by natural selection. His extensive research in the Malay Archipelago significantly contributed to the study of biogeography. He made lasting impacts on evolutionary science and is often regarded as the co-founder of the theory alongside Charles Darwin. Here are 32 of his quotes:

Modification of form is admitted to be a matter of time.

Alfred Russel Wallace

In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found.

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

Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.

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

There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter.

Alfred Russel Wallace

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

Alfred Russel Wallace

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

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

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

On the spiritual theory, man consists essentially of a spiritual nature or mind intimately associated with a spiritual body or soul, both of which are developed in and by means of a material organism.

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

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

I spent, as you know, a year and a half in a clergyman's family and heard almost every Tuesday the very best, most earnest and most impressive preacher it has ever been my fortune to meet with, but it produced no effect whatever on my mind.

Alfred Russel Wallace

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

Alfred Russel Wallace

He [the naturalist] looks upon every species of animal and plant now living as the individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth's history; and, as a few lost letters may make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of the numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will necessarily render obscure this invaluable record of the past.

Alfred Russel Wallace

We permit absolute possession of the soil of our country, with no legal rights of existence on the soil to the vast majority who do not possess it. A great landholder may legally convert his whole property into a forest or a hunting-ground, and expel every human being who has hitherto lived upon it. In a thickly-populated country like England, where every acre has its owner and its occupier, this is a power of legally destroying his fellow-creatures; and that such a power should exist, and be exercised by individuals, in however small a degree, indicates that, as regards true social science, we are still in a state of barbarism.

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

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

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

I think I have fairly heard and fairly weighed the evidence on both sides, and I remain an utter disbeliever in almost all that you consider the most sacred truths... I can see much to admire in all religions... But whether there be a God and whatever be His nature; whether we have an immortal soul or not, or whatever may be our state after death, I can have no fear of having to suffer for the study of nature and the search for truth.

Alfred Russel Wallace