Charles darwin quotes

That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.

We are optimists, until we are not.

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.

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

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.

The normal food of man is vegetable.

It is a truly wonderful fact - the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity - that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group.

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.

Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.

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.

Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.

This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.

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

I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things; and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever - much cleverer than the discoverers - never originate anything.

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

It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.

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

...for the shield may be as important for victory, as the sword or spear.

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

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.

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

I think it can be shown that there is such an unerring power at work in Natural Selection, which selects exclusively for the good of each organic being.

It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain gravity? No one now objects to following out the results consequent on this unknown element of attraction.

Not one change of species into another is on record ... we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.

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

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

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?

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.

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

Some call it evolution, And others call it God.

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by mans attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than the woman. Whether deep thought, reason, or imagination or merely the use of the senses and hands.....We may also infer.....The average mental power in man must be above that of woman.

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.

... not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.

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

The willing horse is always overworked.

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

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relationship to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.

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.

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

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

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

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

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

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.

The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

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.

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

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.

... probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.

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

Light may be shed on man and his origins.

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.

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.

The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.

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.

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

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

Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.

In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God ... I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.

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

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.

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

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.

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

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change, that lives within the means available and works co-operatively against common threats.

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

Nothing exists for itself alone, but only in relation to other forms of life

There is no fundamental difference between humans and the higher mammalsin their mental faculties

Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music.

The question of whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed.

We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.

Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a great deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.

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

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

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.

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.

The moral faculties are generally esteemed, and with justice, as of higher value than the intellectual powers. But we should always bear in mind that the activity of the mind in vividly recalling past impressions is one of the fundamental though secondary bases of conscience. This fact affords the strongest argument for educating and stimulating in all possible ways the intellectual faculties of every human being.

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.

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.

...I believe there exists, & I feel within me, an instinct for the truth, or knowledge or discovery, of something of the same nature as the instinct of virtue, & that our having such an instinct is reason enough for scientific researches without any practical results ever ensuing from them.

Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

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

How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods. Can we wonder, then, that nature's productions should be far 'truer' in character than man's productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?

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

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

A language, like a species, when extinct, never... reappears.

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 freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

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

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.

Man, wonderful man, must collapse, into nature's cauldron, he is no deity, he is no exception.

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

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

One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.

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

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.

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.

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.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

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.

It is impossible to concieve of this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity.

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

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

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

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

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.

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

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.

How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.

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.

Only the fittest will survive.

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

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'.

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future.

Building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.

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

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.

It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

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

Looking to future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker... the social instincts, - the prime principle of man's moral constitution - with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule, "As ye would that men should do to you; do ye to them likewise"; and this lies at the foundation of morality.

If every one were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty.