Charles Darwin Quotes
A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
The world will not be inherited by the strongest, it will be inherited by those most able to change.
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.
An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.
It is not the biggest, the brightest or the best that will survive, but those who adapt the quickest.
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.
What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!
There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
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.
It is impossible to concieve of this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity.
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.
Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.
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.
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 change of species into another is on record ... we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.
In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.
A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." Charles Darwin
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.
Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.
To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
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 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.
Even people who aren’t geniuses can outthink the rest of mankind if they develop certain thinking habits.
It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
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.
The most powerful natural species are those that adapt to environmental change without losing their fundamental identity which gives them their competitive advantage.
There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved
The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.
we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps
...I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think there is an eminently important difference.
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.
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.
To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree
Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.