Charles Darwin Quotes

369 Sourced Quotes

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed 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
How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.

Charles Darwin
Thus we learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.

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

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

Charles Darwin
The earthquake, however, must be to every one a most impressive event: the earth, considered from our earliest childhood as the type of solidity, has oscillated like a thin crust beneath our feet; and in seeing the laboured works of man in a moment overthrown, we feel the insignificance of his boasted power.

Charles Darwin
Please observe the question is not whether there are more or fewer varieties in larger or smaller genera, but whether there is a stronger or weaker tendency in the minds of botanists to record such in large or small genera.

Charles Darwin
An organic being is a microcosm — a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and numerous as the stars of heaven.

Charles Darwin
Truly the schemes and wonders of Nature are illimitable.

Charles Darwin
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.

Charles Darwin
He who rejects this view of the imperfection of the geological record, will rightly reject the whole theory. For he may ask in vain where are the numberless transitional links which must formerly have connected the closely allied or representative species found in the successive stages of the same great formation?

Charles Darwin
How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods. Can we wonder, then, that nature's productions should be far 'truer' in character than man's productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?

Charles Darwin
But at present, after drawing up a rough copy on this subject, my conclusion is that external conditions do extremely little, except in causing mere variability. This mere variability (causing the child not closely to resemble the parent) I look at as very different from the formation of a marked variety or new species.

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

Charles Darwin
The value of the products of our imagination depends, of course, on the number, accuracy, and clearness of our impressions, on our judgment and taste in selecting or rejecting the involuntary combinations, and to a certain extent on our power of voluntary [combinations of] them...

Charles Darwin
Conscience looks backwards and judges past actions, inducing that kind of dissatisfaction, which if weak we call regret, and if severe remorse.

Charles Darwin
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 gravity? No one now objects to following out the results consequent on this unknown element of attraction...

Charles Darwin
From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed.... To group all facts under some general laws.

Charles Darwin
Nature... cares nothing for appearances, except insofar as they are useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life.

Charles Darwin
Children are one's greatest happiness, but often and often a still greater misery. A man of science ought to have none — perhaps not a wife; for then there would be nothing in this wide world worth caring for, and a man might (whether he could is another question) work away like a Trojan.

Charles Darwin
The instruction at Edinburgh was altogether by lectures, and these were intolerably dull, with the exception of those on chemistry.

Charles Darwin
The truth will not penetrate a preoccupied mind.

Charles Darwin
If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, suffering and famine — our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements — they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor — we may be all melted together.

Charles Darwin
The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

Charles Darwin
I am inclined to give up the attempt as hopeless. Those who do not understand, it seems cannot be made to understand.

Charles Darwin
If you knew some of the experiments (if they may be so-called) which I am trying, you would have a good right to sneer, for they are so absurd even in my opinion that I dare not tell you.

Charles Darwin
The plough is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man's inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly ploughed, and still continues to be thus ploughed by earth-worms.

Charles Darwin
Every one must be struck with astonishment, when he first beholds one of these vast rings of coral-rock, often many leagues in diameter, here and there surmounted by a low verdant island with dazzling white shores, bathed on the outside by the foaming breakers of the ocean, and on the inside surrounding a calm expanse of water, which, from reflection, is of a bright but pale green color.

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
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