Charles Darwin Quotes

369 Sourced Quotes

I have an old belief that a good observer really means a good theorist.

Charles Darwin
People complain of the unequal distribution of wealth [but it is a far greater] injustice that any one man should have the power to write so many brilliant essays... There is no one who writes like [Thomas Huxley].

Charles Darwin
I have heard, by roundabout channel, that Herschel says my book [The Origin of the Species] "is the law of higgledy-piggledy." What this exactly means I do not know, but it is evidently very contemptuous. If true this is a great blow and discouragement.

Charles Darwin
No one has a right to speculate without distinct facts.

Charles Darwin
If a person asked my advice, before undertaking a long voyage, my answer would depend upon his possessing a decided taste for some branch of knowledge, which could by this means be advanced. No doubt it is a high satisfaction to behold various countries and the many races of mankind, but the pleasures gained at the time do not counterbalance the evils.

Charles Darwin
I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand. It is not a pleasant place. Amongst the natives there is absent that charming simplicity.... and the greater part of the English are the very refuse of society.

Charles Darwin
The love of a dog for his master is notorious; in the agony of death he has been known to caress his master, and everyone has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life.

Charles Darwin
The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.

Charles Darwin
Accuracy is the soul of Natural History. It is hard to become accurate; he who modifies a hair's breadth will never be accurate... Absolute accuracy is the hardest merit to attain, and the highest merit.

Charles Darwin
One great source of perplexity to me is an utter ignorance whether I note the right facts, and whether they are of sufficient importance to interest others.

Charles Darwin
How dreadfully difficult it is to name plants.

Charles Darwin
All young geologists have a great turn for speculation; I have burned my fingers pretty sharply in that way, and am now inclined to cavil at speculation when the direct and immediate effect of a cause in question cannot be shown.

Charles Darwin
Nature will tell you a direct lie if she can.

Charles Darwin
This wonderful relationship in the same continent between the dead and the living, will, I do not doubt, hereafter throw more light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance from it, than any other class of facts.

Charles Darwin
I have long discovered that geologists never read each other's works, and that the only object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness.

Charles Darwin
If variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being perserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offsping similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.

Charles Darwin
A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.

Charles Darwin
The more efficient causes of progress seem to consist of a good education during youth whilst the brain is impressible, and of a high standard of excellence, inculcated by the ablest and best men, embodied in the laws, customs and traditions of the nation, and enforced by public opinion.

Charles Darwin
It seems therefore that a taste for collecting beetles is some indication of future success in life!

Charles Darwin
This sketch is most imperfect; but in so short a space I cannot make it better. Your imagination must fill up many wide blanks. Without some reflexion it will appear all rubbish; perhaps it will appear so after reflexion.

Charles Darwin
I must begin with a good body of facts and not from a principle (in which I always suspect some fallacy) and then as much deduction as you please.

Charles Darwin
If Mozart, instead of playing the pianoforte at three years old with wonderfully little practice, had played a tune with no practice at all, he might truly have been said to have done so instinctively.

Charles Darwin
I look at the natural geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.

Charles Darwin
It occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made of this question (the origin of the species) by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it

Charles Darwin
Extravagant theories, however, in those parts of philosophy, where our knowledge is yet imperfect, are not without their use; as they encourage the execution of laborious experiments, or the investigation of ingenious deductions, to conform or refute them.

Charles Darwin
In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.

Charles Darwin
I am in thick mud; the orthodox would say in fetid abominable mud. I believe I am in much the same frame of mind as an old gorilla would be in if set to learn the first book of Euclid... yet I cannot keep out of the question.

Charles Darwin
For without the making of theories I am convinced there would be no observation.

Charles Darwin
But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I full believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?

Charles Darwin
I am quite charmed with Geology, but like the wise animal between two bundles of hay, I do not know which to like the best; the old crystalline group of rocks, or the softer and fossilferous beds.

Charles Darwin