Charles Darwin Quotes

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

Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.

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

We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.

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.

Till facts are grouped & called there can be no prediction. The only advantage of discovering laws is to foretell what will happen & to see bearing of scattered facts.

It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant.

Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.

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

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

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

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

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

We are optimists, until we are not.

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

Hence, a traveller should be a botanist, for in all views plants form the chief embellishment.

It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the plan of creation or unity of design, etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact.

With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.

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.

Sympathy for the lowest animals is one of the noblest virtues with which man is endowed.

Progress has been much more general than retrogression

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficient and omnipotent God would have designedly created...that a cat should play with mice.

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

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.

It's an awful stretcher to believe that a peacock's tail was thus formed but ... most people just don't get it - I must be a very bad explainer

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

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.

I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.

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

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.

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

... 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.

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

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

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

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, ... I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.

On seeing the marsupials in Australia for the first time and comparing them to placental mammals: “An unbeliever . . . might exclaim 'Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work'”

It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.

Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.

It may be doubted that there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly organized creatures.

With mammals the male appears to win the female much more through the law of battle than through the display of his charms.

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

The willing horse is always overworked.

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

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

Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions.

Mere chance ... alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of difference as that between varieties of the same species.

Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.

I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very like conscience.