Charles Darwin Quotes

369 Sourced Quotes

I am inclined to agree with Francis Galton in believing that education and environment produce only a small effect on the mind of any one, and that most of our qualities are innate.

Charles Darwin
Archaeologists are probably not aware how much they owe to worms for the preservation of many ancient objects. Coins, gold ornaments, stone implements, &c., if dropped on the surface of the ground, will infallibly be buried by the castings of worms in a few years, and will thus be safely preserved, until the land at some future time is turned up.

Charles Darwin
If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.

Charles Darwin
It strikes me that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen would know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.

Charles Darwin
Nobody but a person fond of Natural History can imagine the pleasure of strolling under cocoa-nuts in a thicket of bananas and coffee-plants, and an endless number of wildflowers.

Charles Darwin
It is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing, though so necessary beforehand and so useful afterwards.

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

Charles Darwin
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.

Charles Darwin
I do not think more credit is due a man for defining a species, than to a carpenter for making a box. But I am foolish and rabid against species-mongers, or rather against their vanity; it is useful and necessary work which must be done; but they act as if they had actually made the species, and it was their own property.

Charles Darwin
Anyone who attempts to predict the history of the next ten years is a rash man, and if he attempts to make his forecast for a century he is very properly regarded as so foolhardy as not to be worth listening to at all.

Charles Darwin
It is well to remember that Naturalists value observations far more than reasoning.

Charles Darwin
Any variation which is not inherited is unimportant for us.

Charles Darwin
For instance, I cannot doubt that all the Silurian trilobites have descended from some one crustacean, which must have lived long before the Silurian age, and which probably differed greatly from any known animal.

Charles Darwin
On first examining a new district nothing can appear more hopeless than the chaos of rocks; but by recording the stratification and nature of the rocks and fossils at many points, always reasoning and predicting what will be found elsewhere, light soon begins to dawn on the district, and the structure of the whole becomes more or less intelligible.

Charles Darwin
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.

Charles Darwin
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 degree.

Charles Darwin
As some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

Charles Darwin
A naturalist's life would be a happy one if he had only to observe, and never to write.

Charles Darwin
Nothing is so vexatious to me, as so constantly finding myself drawing different conclusions from better judges than myself, from the same facts.

Charles Darwin
In regard to the amount of difference between the races, we must make some allowance for our nice powers of discrimination gained by a long habit of observing ourselves.

Charles Darwin
There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator 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.

Charles Darwin
The force of impressions generally depends on preconceived ideas.

Charles Darwin
In scientific investigations, it is permitted to invent any hypothesis and, if it explains various large and independent classes of facts, it rises to the ranks of a well-grounded theory.

Charles Darwin
Widely ranging species, abounding in individuals, which have already triumphed over many competitors in their own widely extended homes will have the best chance of seizing on new places, when they spread into new countries.

Charles Darwin
Pray do not suppose that I expect to convert or pervert you; if I could stagger you in ever so slight a degree I should be satisfied; nor fear to annoy me by severe criticisms, for I have had some hearty kicks from some of my best friends.

Charles Darwin
What a splendid pursuit Natural History would be if it was all observing and no writing!

Charles Darwin
What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern?

Charles Darwin
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.

Charles Darwin
Not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.

Charles Darwin
The theory which I would offer, is simply, that as the land with the attached reefs subsides very gradually from the action of subterranean causes, the coral-building polypi soon raise again their solid masses to the level of the water: but not so with the land; each inch lost is irreclaimably gone; as the whole gradually sinks, the water gains foot by foot on the shore, till the last and highest peak is finally submerged.

Charles Darwin