Charles Darwin Quotes

369 Sourced Quotes

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
Nature will tell you a direct lie if she can.

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
How dreadfully difficult it is to name plants.

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

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
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
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
No one has a right to speculate without distinct facts.

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

Charles Darwin
There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures.

Charles Darwin
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Nature tells us, in the most emphatic manner, that she abhors perpetual self-fertilisation.

Charles Darwin
The passion for collecting which leads a man to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was very strong in me, and was clearly innate, as none of my sisters or brothers ever had this taste.

Charles Darwin
My books have sold largely in England, have been translated into many languages, and passed through several editions in foreign countries. I have heard it said that the success of a work abroad is the best test of its enduring value. I doubt whether this is at all trustworthy; but judged by this standard my name ought to last for a few years.

Charles Darwin
The progenitors of man must have been aquatic in their habits; for morphology plainly tells us that our lungs consist of a modified swim-bladder, which once served as a float.

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

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

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