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Truth is born into this world only with pangs and tribulations, and every fresh truth is received unwillingly.
— Alfred Russel Wallace
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Alfred Russel Wallace
mathematician, biologist, explorer, anthropologist, zoologist, naturalist, anti-vaccine activist, ornithologist, entomologist, geographer, beekeeper, botanist, world traveler, writer, zoological collector, botanical collector
1823 – 1913
Alfred Russel Wallace was an English naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator. He independently conceived the theory of evolution through natural selection; his 1858 paper on the subject was published that year alongside extracts from Charles Darwin's earlier writings on the topic. It spurred Darwin to set aside the "big species book" he was drafting and to quickly write an abstract of it, which was published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species.
All Quotes by Alfred Russel Wallace
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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
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Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.
— Alfred Russel Wallace
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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
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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
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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