Charles Darwin Quotes

It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.

I have long discovered that geologists never read each other's works, and that the only object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness.

Conscience looks backwards and judges past actions, inducing that kind of dissatisfaction, which if weak we call regret, and if severe remorse.

Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.

A pleasurable and excited state of mind, associated with affection, is exhibited by some dogs in a very peculiar manner, namely, by grinning.

I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

We fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.

It's not the strongest, but the most adaptable that survive.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.

As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.

We stop looking for monsters under our beds when we realize they are inside us.

If any man wants to gain a good opinion of his fellow men, he ought to do what I am doing: pester them with letters.

A cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus.

One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges ...

Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.

We are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps

The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man's ignorance.

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!

Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!! The devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.

The main conclusion here arrived at ... is that man is descended from some less highly organized form.

Two distinct elements are included under the term "inheritance" - the transmission, and the development of characters;

An agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.

It is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing, though so necessary beforehand and so useful afterwards.

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree

Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.

Nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in a distant country.

Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.

Some call it evolution, And others call it God.

A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone.

If I had not been so great an invalid, I should not have done so much as I have accomplished.

This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.

It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant.

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.

It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter.

An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.

We are optimists, until we are not.

I ought, or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

The most energetic workers I have encountered in my world travels are the vegetarian miners of Chile.

[T]he young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.

Nature will tell you a direct lie if she can.

The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers.

Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but at last it was complete.

The season of love is that of battle. The roots of these fights run deep.

The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.

I believe man . . . in the same predicament with other animals.

Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.

Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.

I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.

I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected facts.

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.

I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.

It is not the biggest, the brightest or the best that will survive, but those who adapt the quickest.

There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved

I always make special notes about evidence that contridicts me: supportive evidence I can remember without trying.

I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.

Light may be shed on man and his origins.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms.

None can reply - all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue, which teaches awful doubt.

Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.

This prophecy has turned out entirely and miserably wrong.

Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

Language is an art, like brewing or baking ... It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt.

I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone.

Sympathy for the lowest animals is one of the noblest virtues with which man is endowed.

On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.

Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.

The world will not be inherited by the strongest, it will be inherited by those most able to change.

The normal food of man is vegetable.

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.

We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.

Sympathy will have been increased through natural selection

I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.

I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance Huxley

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.

He who understands baboons would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.

But I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.

I am not the least afraid to die

Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science.

Even people who aren't geniuses can outthink the rest of mankind if they develop certain thinking habits.

I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very like conscience.

Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.

Sexual selection will also be largely dominated by natural selection tending towards the general welfare of the species.

The man who walks with Henslow.

Thomson's views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.

Whilst Man, however well-behaved,
At best is but a monkey shaved!

Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.

If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.

A republic cannot succeed, till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.

Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have.

I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

The age-old and noble thought of 'I will lay down my life to save another,' is nothing more than cowardice.

A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question. Charles Darwin