Top 100 Charles Darwin Quotes
#1. Till facts be grouped and called there can be no prediction. The only advantage of discovering laws is to foretell what will happen and to see the bearing of scattered facts.
Charles Darwin
#2. Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.
Charles Darwin
#3. I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.
Charles Darwin
#4. Sexual selection acts in a less rigorous manner than natural selection. The latter produces its effects by the life or death at all ages of the more or less successful individuals.
Charles Darwin
#5. In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.
Charles Darwin
#6. On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.
Charles Darwin
#7. Music was known and understood before words were spoken.
Charles Darwin
#8. Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.
Charles Darwin
#9. The more efficient causes of progress seem to consist of a good education during youth whilst the brain is impressible, and of a high standard of excellence, inculcated by the ablest and best men, embodied in the laws, customs and traditions of the nation, and enforced by public opinion.
Charles Darwin
#10. From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of stars in constellations.
Charles Darwin
#11. About weak points [of the Origin] I agree. The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known gradations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder.
Charles Darwin
#12. There is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be NATURALLY SELECTED.
Charles Darwin
#13. Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.
Charles Darwin
#14. 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
#16. With mammals the male appears to win the female much more through the law of battle than through the display of his charms.
Charles Darwin
#17. If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
Charles Darwin
#18. As some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.
Charles Darwin
#19. Language is an art, like brewing or baking ... It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt.
Charles Darwin
#20. Thomson's views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.
Charles Darwin
#21. 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
#22. None can reply - all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue, which teaches awful doubt.
Charles Darwin
#23. Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us - of their imagined approbation or disapprobation.
Charles Darwin
#24. It may be conceit, but I believe the subject will interest the public, and I am sure that the views are original.
Charles Darwin
#25. I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.
Charles Darwin
#26. The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. Happiness is never better exhibited than by young animals, such as puppies, kittens, lambs, &c., when playing together, like our own children.
Charles Darwin
#27. Traveling ought also to teach him distrust; but at the same time he will discover, how many truly kind-hearted people there are, with whom he never before had, or ever again will have any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him the most disinterested assistance.
Charles Darwin
#28. The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.
Charles Darwin
#29. I have described, in the second chapter, the gait and appearance of a dog when cheerful, and the marked antithesis presented by the same animal when dejected and disappointed, with his head, ears, body, tail, and chops drooping, and eyes dull.
Charles Darwin
#30. Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.
Charles Darwin
#31. Nothing exists for itself alone, but only in relation to other forms of life
Charles Darwin
#32. Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care.
Charles Darwin
#33. As the species of the same genus usually have, though by no means invariably, much similarity in habits and constitution, and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between them, if they come into competition with each other, than between the species of distinct genera.
Charles Darwin
#34. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.
Charles Darwin
#35. The instruction at Edinburgh was altogether by lectures, and these were intolerably dull, with the exception of those on chemistry.
Charles Darwin
#36. The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers.
Charles Darwin
#37. Jealousy was plainly exhibited when I fondled a large doll, and when I weighed his infant sister, he being then 15? months old. Seeing how strong a feeling of jealousy is in dogs, it would probably be exhibited by infants at any earlier age than just specified if they were tried in a fitting manner
Charles Darwin
#38. The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.
Charles Darwin
#39. How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.
Charles Darwin
#40. But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?
Charles Darwin
#41. Some highly competent authorities are convinced that the setter is directly derived from the spaniel, and has probably been slowly altered from it. It is known that the English pointer has been
Charles Darwin
#42. The most energetic workers I have encountered in my world travels are the vegetarian miners of Chile.
Charles Darwin
#43. What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame; the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly.
Charles Darwin
#45. The Times is getting more detestable (but that is too weak word) than ever.
Charles Darwin
#46. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
Charles Darwin
#47. I am not very skeptical ... a good deal of skepticism in a scientific man is advisable to avoid much loss of time, but I have met not a few men, who ... have often thus been deterred from experiments or observations which would have proven servicable.
Charles Darwin
#48. I conclude that the musical notes and rhythms were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.
Charles Darwin
#49. We here see in two distant countries a similar relation between plants and insects of the same families, though the species of both are different. When man is the agent in introducing into a country a new species this relation is often broken:
Charles Darwin
#51. I often had to run very quickly to be on time, and from being a fleet runner was generally successful; but when in doubt I prayed earnestly to God to help me, and I well remember that I attributed my success to the prayers and not to my quick running, and marvelled how generally I was aided.
Charles Darwin
#52. We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.
Charles Darwin
#54. 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.
Charles Darwin
#55. It was evident that such facts as these, as well as many others, could only be explained on the supposition that species gradually become modified; and the subject haunted me.
Charles Darwin
#56. I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most.
Charles Darwin
#58. An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.
Charles Darwin
#59. The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
Charles Darwin
#60. A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.
Charles Darwin
#61. Man could no longer be regarded as the Lord of Creation, a being apart from the rest of nature. He was merely the representative of one among many Families of the order Primates in the class Mammalia.
Charles Darwin
#62. I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men
Charles Darwin
#63. In the future I see open fields for more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by graduation.
Charles Darwin
#64. It strikes me that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen would know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.
Charles Darwin
#65. This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.
Charles Darwin
#66. Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd [should] be forestalled ... I never saw a more striking coincidence. If Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters.
Charles Darwin
#67. Man, wonderful man, must collapse, into nature's cauldron, he is no deity, he is no exception.
Charles Darwin
#68. It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
Charles Darwin
#69. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
Charles Darwin
#70. Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.
Charles Darwin
#71. I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance Huxley
Charles Darwin
#72. Each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ratio ... each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction ... The vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.
Charles Darwin
#73. If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.
Charles Darwin
#74. With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.
Charles Darwin
#75. Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music.
Charles Darwin
#76. I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.
Charles Darwin
#77. It seems pretty clear that organic beings must be exposed during several generations to the new conditions of life to cause any appreciable amount of variation; and that when the organisation has once begun to vary, it generally continues to vary for many generations.
Charles Darwin
#78. But Geology carries the day: it is like the pleasure of gambling, speculating, on first arriving, what the rocks may be; I often mentally cry out 3 to 1 Tertiary against primitive; but the latter have hitherto won all the bets.
Charles Darwin
#79. In conclusion, it appears that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries.
Charles Darwin
#80. I ought, or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.
Charles Darwin
#81. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.
Charles Darwin
#82. An agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.
Charles Darwin
#83. He who understands baboons would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.
Charles Darwin
#84. Not one change of species into another is on record ... we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.
Charles Darwin
#85. At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry.
Charles Darwin
#86. People complain of the unequal distribution of wealth [but it is a far greater] injustice that any one man should have the power to write so many brilliant essays ... There is no one who writes like [Thomas Huxley].
Charles Darwin
#87. The man that created the theory of evolution by natural selection was thrown out by his Dad because he wanted him to be a doctor. GAWD, parents haven't changed much.
Charles Darwin
#88. 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.
Charles Darwin
#89. What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!
Charles Darwin
#90. The elder Geoffroy and Goethe propounded, at about the same time, their law of compensation or balancement of growth; or, as Goethe expressed it, in order to spend on one side, nature is forced to economise on the other side.
Charles Darwin
#91. It is impossible to concieve of this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity.
Charles Darwin
#92. It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant.
Charles Darwin
#93. Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.
Charles Darwin
#94. It struck me that favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones tend to be destroyed
Charles Darwin
#95. For forms existing in larger numbers will always have a better chance, within any given period, of presenting further favourable variations for natural selection to seize on, than will the rarer forms which exist in lesser numbers.
Charles Darwin
#96. 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 & believe what he can. -
Charles Darwin
#97. I feel like an old warhorse at the sound of a trumpet when I read about the capturing of rare beetles.
Charles Darwin
#98. Sympathy will have been increased through natural selection
Charles Darwin
#99. Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than humans would at first suppose.
Charles Darwin
#100. Hence, a traveller should be a botanist, for in all views plants form the chief embellishment.
Charles Darwin
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