Frans de Waal Quotes

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking - all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

I learned the way a monkey learns - by watching its parents.

If you're very open to watching the world go by, with people's different tics, you absorb it all without realizing it and find ways to put something into your character. I'm not sure I'm always aware I'm mimicking someone.

There's one thing that shows up on all of the lists of what makes us human: language. Our ability to share our thoughts and complex information with others far surpasses all the barks, squeaks and growls of our animal friends.

Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language - sign language - and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.

Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.

Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities.

Evolution explains our biological evolution, but human beings are very unique creatures. As the Dobzhansky said, all animals are unique; humans are the uniquest. And that uniqueness of being human, language, art, culture, our dependency on culture for survival, comes from the combination of traditional biological evolution.

I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker - yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

I learned a lot just watching people perform.

I love observing both vocally and by sight. So I take on a lot of those elements of people around me.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

I'm a people watcher, and I love to listen.

I observe how people walk, laugh and talk. More than people I observe animals.

No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.

One of my passions is to meet people and then imitate them. I love doing that.

No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.

We learn by observation, imitation and repetition.

He smiles but rarely and watches other men to see when they laugh and then does the same.

Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?

Man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do.

The little child learns to speak, though it has no learned teachers - because it lives with those who know how to speak.

We are, in truth, more than half what we are by imitation.

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.