Quotes About Charles Darwin

#1. Somewhere, Charles Darwin nodded and smiled a knowing smile.

David Wong

#2. This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.

Charles Darwin

#3. Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves.

Charles Darwin

#4. 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

#5. Although I am fully convinced of the truth of Evolution, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists. But I look with confidence to the future naturalists, who will be able to view both sides with impartiality.

Charles Darwin

#6. We don't want to be the conquistadors. We want to be Charles Darwin.

Lydia Millet

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

Charles Darwin

#8. One doubts existence of free will [because] every action determined by heredity, constitution, example of others or teaching of others." "This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything ... nor ought one to blame others.

Charles Darwin

#9. Animals manifestly enjoy excitement, and suffer from annul and may exhibit curiosity.

Charles Darwin

#10. By the age of 11, I was no longer going to Sunday Mass, and going on birdwatching walks with my father. So early on, I heard of Charles Darwin. I guess, you know, he was the big hero. And, you know, you understand life as it now exists through evolution.

James D. Watson

#11. I am a firm believer, that without speculation there is no good and original observation.

Charles Darwin

#12. Those who think 'Science is Measurement' should search Darwin's works for numbers and equations.

David H. Hubel

#13. I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.

Charles Darwin

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

Charles Darwin

#15. The man who walks with Henslow.

Charles Darwin

#16. 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

#17. In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.

Charles Darwin

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

Charles Darwin

#19. He who remains passive when over-whelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering his elasticity of mind.

Charles Darwin

#20. 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

#21. 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

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

Charles Darwin

#23. It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist and an evolutionist ... I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.

Charles Darwin

#24. On your life, underestimating the proclivities of finches is likely to lead to great internal hemorrhaging.

Charles Darwin

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

Charles Darwin

#26. We must be more and more to each other, my dear wife.' -Charles Darwin to wife Emma upon loss of daughter Annie

Deborah Heiligman

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

Charles Darwin

#28. I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it.

Charles Darwin

#29. If the country were open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this also would seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants.

Charles Darwin

#30. 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

#31. But when on shore, & wandering in the sublime forests, surrounded by views more gorgeous than even Claude ever imagined, I enjoy a delight which none but those who have experienced it can understand.

Charles Darwin

#32. The young blush much more freely than the old but not during infancy, which is remarkable, as we know that infants at a very early age redden from passion.

Charles Darwin

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

Charles Darwin

#34. Music was known and understood before words were spoken.

Charles Darwin

#35. Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.

Charles Darwin

#36. In regard to the amount of difference between the races, we must make some allowance for our nice powers of discrimination gained by a long habit of observing ourselves.

Charles Darwin

#37. 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

#38. 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

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

Charles Darwin

#40. As Charles Darwin said,'The economy shown by Nature in her resources is striking,' says the Spirit. 'All wealth comes from Nature. Without it, there wouldn't be any economics. The primary wealth is food, not money. Therefore anything that concerns the handling of the land also concerns me.

Margaret Atwood

#41. Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence consequent on his multiplication; and if he is to advance still higher, it is to be feared that he must remain subject to a severe struggle.

Charles Darwin

#42. I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.

Charles Darwin

#43. I long to set foot where no man has trod before.

Charles Darwin

#44. 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

#45. Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.

Charles Darwin

#46. 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

#47. Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.

Charles Darwin

#48. 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

#49. The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen-this again offers contradiction to constant succession of germs in progress.

Charles Darwin

#50. Much love much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love.

Charles Darwin

#51. Darwinism is not eugenics, but all eugenicists were devoted Darwinists, staring with Darwin's sons Leonard.

A.E. Samaan

#52. Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.

Charles Darwin

#53. What an extraordinary thing it is, Mr. Darwin seems to spend hours in cracking a horse-whip in his room, for I often hear the crack when I pass under his windows.

Charles Darwin

#54. Light may be shed on man and his origins.

Charles Darwin

#55. [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.

Charles Darwin

#56. I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects ...

Charles Darwin

#57. We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.

Charles Darwin

#58. A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

Charles Darwin

#59. The limit of man s knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination.

Charles Darwin

#60. I didn't know children were expected to have literary heroes, but I certainly had one, and I even identified with him at one time: Doctor Dolittle, whom I now half identify with the Charles Darwin of Beagle days.

Richard Dawkins

#61. But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.

Charles Darwin

#62. The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind, he says, is Charles Darwin - who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements.

Kurt Vonnegut

#63. The embryological record is almost always abbreviated in accordance with the tendency of nature (to be explained on the principle of survival of the fittest) to attain her needs by the easiest means.

Francis Maitland Balfour

#64. Even the humblest mammal's strong sexual, parental, and social instincts give rise to 'do unto others as yourself' and 'love thy neighbor as thyself'.

Charles Darwin

#65. 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

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

Charles Darwin

#67. immutable productions

Charles Darwin

#68. 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

#69. 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

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

Charles Darwin

#71. Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps.

Charles Darwin

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

Charles Darwin

#73. 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?

Charles Darwin

#74. 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

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

Charles Darwin

#76. Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.

Charles Darwin

#77. It is scarcely possible to doubt that the love of man has become instinctive in the dog.

Charles Darwin

#78. Who when examining in the cabinet of the entomologist the gay and exotic butterflies, and singular cicadas, will associate with these lifeless objects, the ceaseless harsh music of the latter, and the lazy flight of the former - the sure accompaniments of the still, glowing noonday of the tropics.

Charles Darwin

#79. A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.

Charles Darwin

#80. 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

#81. Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.

Charles Darwin

#82. The most important factor in survival is neither intelligence nor strength but adaptability.

Charles Darwin

#83. May we not suspect that the vague but very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times?

Charles Darwin

#84. The lives of those such as Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein are plainly of interest in their own right, as well as for the light they shed on the way these great scientists worked. But are 'routine' scientists as fascinating as their science? Here I have my doubts.

Martin Rees

#85. It may be conceit, but I believe the subject will interest the public, and I am sure that the views are original.

Charles Darwin

#86. I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture.

Charles Darwin

#87. I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.

Charles Darwin

#88. It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.

Charles Darwin

#89. 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

#90. He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation ... Man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.

Charles Darwin

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. He [Erasmus Darwin] used to say that 'unitarianism was a feather-bed to catch a falling Christian.

Charles Darwin

#94. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.

Charles Darwin

#95. From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed ... To group all facts under some general laws.

Charles Darwin

#96. The most powerful natural species are those that adapt to environmental change without losing their fundamental identity which gives them their competitive advantage.

Charles Darwin

#97. The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.

Charles Darwin

#98. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.

Charles Darwin

#99. I am actually weary of telling people that I do not pretend to adduce [direct] evidence of one species changing into another, but I believe that this view is in the main correct, because so many phenomena can thus be grouped end explained.

Charles Darwin

#100. One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

Charles Darwin