“If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.”
― Charles Darwin
“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”
― Charles Darwin
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
― Charles Darwin
“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
― Charles Darwin
“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
― Charles Darwin
“We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.”
― Charles Darwin
“The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.”
― Charles Darwin
“I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men”
― Charles Darwin
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives,
not the most intelligent that survives.
It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
― Charles Darwin
“The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.”
― Charles Darwin
“The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognise that we ought to control our thoughts.”
― Charles Darwin
“An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.”
― Charles Darwin
“Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.”
― Charles Darwin
“Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.”
― Charles Darwin
“One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.”
― Charles Darwin
“…But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice… I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.”
― Charles Darwin
“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
― Charles Darwin
“Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.”
― Charles Darwin
“We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”
― CHARLES DARWIN
“As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”
― Charles
“Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.”
― Charles Darwin
“Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult–at least I have found it so–than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.”
― Charles Darwin
“We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.”
― Charles Darwin
“The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. For, firstly, the social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.”
― Charles Darwin
“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.”
― Charles Darwin
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.”
― Charles Darwin
“I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone.”
― Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
“Great is the power of steady misrepresentation”
― Charles Darwin
“But I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.”
― Charles Darwin
“Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble, and I believe truer, to consider him created from animals.”
― Charles Darwin
“Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.”
― Charles Darwin
“…for the shield may be as important for victory, as the sword or spear.”
― Charles Darwin
“There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.”
― Charles Darwin
“To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.”
― Charles Darwin
“It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.”
― Charles Darwin
“I am not the least afraid to die”
― Charles Darwin
“We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.”
― Charles Darwin
“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree…The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory.”
― Charles Darwin
“But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
[To William Graham 3 July 1881]”
― Charles Darwin
“False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.”
― Charles Darwin
“For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs—as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.”
― Charles Darwin
“The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason.”
― Charles Darwin
“we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps”
― Charles Darwin
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
― Charles Darwin
“The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
― Charles Darwin
“We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.”
― Charles Darwin
“Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!”
― Charles Darwin
“A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.”
― Charles Darwin
“One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand. Then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.”
― Charles Darwin
“False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.”
― Charles Darwin