Charles Darwin Quotes

369 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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 truth will not penetrate a preoccupied mind.

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
Truly the schemes and wonders of Nature are illimitable.

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
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
It is easy to specify the individual objects of admiration in these grand scenes; but it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, astonishment, and devotion, which fill and elevate the mind.

Charles Darwin
As it is certain that worms swallow many little stones, independently of those swallowed while excavating their burrows, it is probable that they serve, like mill-stones, to triturate their food.

Charles Darwin
Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

Charles Darwin
The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Charles Darwin
I am actually weary of telling people that I do not pretend to adduce [direct] evidence of one species changing into another, but I believe that this view is in the main correct, because so many phenomena can thus be grouped end explained.

Charles Darwin
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.

Charles Darwin
A republic cannot succeed, till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.

Charles Darwin
Even insects express anger, terror, jealousy, and love by their stridulation.

Charles Darwin
It is certain that there may be extraordinary mental activity with an extremely small absolute mass of nervous matter: thus the wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants are notorious, yet their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin's head. Under this point of view, the brain of an ant is one of the most marvelous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man.

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

Charles Darwin
We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.

Charles Darwin