Charles Darwin quotes
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The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
-- Charles Darwin -
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
-- Charles Darwin -
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
-- Charles Darwin -
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
-- Charles Darwin -
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An agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.
-- Charles Darwin -
Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.
-- Charles Darwin -
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 -
A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
-- Charles Darwin -
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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 -
Nothing exists for itself alone, but only in relation to other forms of life
-- Charles Darwin -
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
-- Charles Darwin -
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.
-- Charles Darwin -
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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 Darwin -
Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.
-- 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 -
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
-- Charles Darwin -
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Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system- with all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
-- 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 -
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 -
An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.
-- Charles Darwin -
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Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.
-- Charles Darwin -
Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
-- Charles Darwin -
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 -
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 -
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Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.
-- Charles Darwin -
On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.
-- Charles Darwin -
Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.
-- Charles Darwin -
How so many absurd rules of conduct, as well as so many absurd religious beliefs, have originated, we do not know; nor how it is that they have become, in all quarters of the world, so deeply impressed on the minds of men; but it is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, while the brain is impressionable, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.
-- Charles Darwin -
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The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.
-- Charles Darwin -
My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
-- 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...We behold the face of nature bright with gladness...We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects and seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life.
-- Charles Darwin -
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.
-- Charles Darwin -
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Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.
-- Charles Darwin -
Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.
-- Charles Darwin -
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 -
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 -
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There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures.
-- 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 -
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 -
...for the shield may be as important for victory, as the sword or spear.
-- Charles Darwin -
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As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates; so that we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of any one country, although on the ordinary view supposed to have been specially created and adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the naturalised productions from another land.
-- Charles Darwin -
Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.
-- Charles Darwin -
We have happy days, remember good dinners.
-- Charles Darwin -
It is scarcely possible to doubt that the love of man has become instinctive in the dog.
-- Charles Darwin -
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Much love much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love.
-- Charles Darwin -
In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.
-- Charles Darwin -
As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.
-- Charles Darwin -
I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very like conscience.
-- Charles Darwin -
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A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." Charles Darwin
-- Charles Darwin -
The plow is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man's inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly plowed, and still continues to be thus plowed by earthworms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.
-- 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 -
I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men
-- Charles Darwin -
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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 -
Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.
-- Charles Darwin -
We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.
-- Charles Darwin -
As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.
-- Charles Darwin -
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The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for 
the existence of God.
-- Charles Darwin -
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 -
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 -
In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.
-- Charles Darwin -
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I trust and believe that the time spent in this voyage ... will produce its full worth in Natural History; and it appears to me the doing what little we can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue.
-- Charles Darwin -
It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
-- 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 -
Nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in a distant country.
-- Charles Darwin -
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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 -
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
-- Charles Darwin -
The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?
-- 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 -
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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 -
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's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.
-- Charles Darwin -
There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.
-- Charles Darwin -
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It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.
-- 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 -
We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.
-- 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 -
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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 -
Thomson's views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.
-- Charles Darwin -
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 -
Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.
-- Charles Darwin -
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The earthquake, however, must be to every one a most impressive event: the earth, considered from our earliest childhood as the type of solidity, has oscillated like a thin crust beneath our feet; and in seeing the laboured works of man in a moment overthrown, we feel the insignificance of his boasted power.
-- Charles Darwin -
There is no fundamental difference between humans and the higher mammalsin their mental faculties
-- Charles Darwin -
Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but at last it was complete.
-- Charles Darwin -
[Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.
-- Charles Darwin -
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Farewell Australia! You ... are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect. I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.
-- Charles Darwin -
One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.
-- Charles Darwin -
A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.
-- Charles Darwin -
When the sexes differ in beauty, in the power of singing, or in producing what I have called instrumental music, it is almost invariably the male which excels the female.
-- Charles Darwin -
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Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have.
-- Charles Darwin -
I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.
-- Charles Darwin -
Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.
-- Charles Darwin -
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 -
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I was a young man with uninformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything; and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.
-- Charles Darwin -
Sympathy will have been increased through natural selection
-- Charles Darwin -
I suppose you are two fathoms deep in mathematics, and if you are, then God help you. For so am I, only with this difference: I stick fast in the mud at the bottom, and there I shall remain.
-- Charles Darwin -
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 -
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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 -
The several difficulties here discussed, namely our not finding in the successive formations infinitely numerous transitional links between the many species which now exist or have existed; the sudden manner in which whole groups of species appear in our European formations; the almost entire absence, as at present known, of fossiliferous formations beneath the Silurian strata, are all undoubtedly of the gravest nature.
-- Charles Darwin -
It may be conceit, but I believe the subject will interest the public, and I am sure that the views are original.
-- 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 -
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