Charles Darwin Quotes (66 Quotes)


    A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

    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.

    But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.


    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.


    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 the what is the essence of the attraction of gravity?



    Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!

    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.


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

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

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

    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.

    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.

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

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

    It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a pas

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

    I fully subscribe to the judgement of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animal, the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important....It is the most noble of all the attributes of man.

    The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is and will always be a wild animal.

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

    A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone.

    It has been a bitter mortification for me to digest the conclusion that the 'race is for the strong' and that I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in science.

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

    I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.

    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.

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

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

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


    The wedge document calls the proposition that human beings are created in the image of God one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization is built. ... not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry and environment.

    The explanation of types of structure in classes - as resulting from the will of the Deity, to create animals on certain plans - is no explanation. It has not the character of a physical law and is therefore utterly useless. It foretells nothing because we know nothing of the will of the Deity, how it acts and whether constant or inconstant like that of man.

    The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest but the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals. It is, however, impossible to maintain that this belief is instinctive in man. The idea of a universal and beneficent creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man until he has been elevated by long, continued culture.

    False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

    For I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I arrived.

    If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.

    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.

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

    These huge reptiles, surrounded by the black lava, the leafless shrubs and large cacti, seemed to my fancy like some antediluvian animals. The few dull-colored birds cared no more for me than they did for the great tortoises.

    The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain - whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses.

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

    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.

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

    What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!

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

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

    Here, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat nearer to the great fact -- the mysteries of mysteries -- the fist appearance of new beings on earth,


    More Charles Darwin Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Life - Mind - Animals - Facts - Science - Time - God - Nature - Ignorance - Future - Custom & Convention - Law & Regulation - World - Reasoning - Principle - Belief & Faith - Morality - Intuition - View All Charles Darwin Quotations

    More Charles Darwin Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - The Origin of Species

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