Alfred Russel Wallace Quotes

Modification of form is admitted to be a matter of time

What birds can have their bills more peculiarly formed than the ibis, the spoonbill, and the heron?

In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found.

Civilisation has ever accompanied emigration and conquest - the conflict of opinion, of religion, or of race

Truth is born into this world only with pangs and tribulations, and every fresh truth is received unwillingly.

I hold with Henry George, that at the back of every great social evil will be found a great political wrong

I am thankful I can see much to admire in all religions.

In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.

The white men in our colonies are too frequently the savages

To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception

There is a tendency in nature to the continued progression of certain classes of varieties further and further from the original type.

Mars, therefore, is not only uninhabited by intelligent beings such as Mr. Lowell postulates, but is absolutely uninhabitable.

On the spiritual theory, man consists essentially of a spiritual nature or mind intimately associated with a spiritual body or soul, both of which are developed in and by means of a material organism

Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.

If this is not done, future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations.

There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter

But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life.

To the mass of mankind religion of some kind is a necessity

As well might it be said that, because we are ignorant of the laws by which metals are produced and trees developed, we cannot know anything of the origin of steamships and railways

What we need are not prohibitory marriage laws, but a reformed society, an educated public opinion which will teach individual duty in these matters

To expect the world to receive a new truth, or even an old truth, without challenging it, is to look for one of those miracles which do not occur.