Charles Darwin Quotes

369 Sourced Quotes

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

Charles Darwin

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

Charles Darwin

When the principles of breeding and of inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining by an easy method whether or not consanguineous marriages are injurious to man.

Charles Darwin

Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.

Charles Darwin

Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.

Charles Darwin

When the sexes differ in beauty, in the power of singing, or in producing what I have called instrumental music, it is almost invariably the male which excels the female.

Charles Darwin

Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee and spirituous liqueurs.

Charles Darwin

Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.

Charles Darwin

When the pots containing two worms which had remained quite indifferent to the sound of the piano, were placed on this instrument, and the note C in the bass clef was struck, both instantly retreated into their burrows.

Charles Darwin

I feel like an old warhorse at the sound of a trumpet when I read about the capturing of rare beetles.

Charles Darwin

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

Charles Darwin

As I was led to keep in my study during many months worms in pots filled with earth, I became interested in them, and wished to learn how far they acted consciously, and how much mental power they displayed

Charles Darwin

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

Charles Darwin

A surprising number [of novels] have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed.

Charles Darwin

The young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.

Charles Darwin

How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view, if it is to be of any service!

Charles Darwin

It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist. … I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.

Charles Darwin

If everyone were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty.

Charles Darwin

It is really laughable to see what different ideas are prominent in various naturalists' minds, when they speak of 'species'; in some, resemblance is everything and descent of little weight-in some, resemblance seems to go for nothing, and Creation the reigning idea-in some, descent is the key,-in some, sterility an unfailing test, with others it is not worth a farthing. It all comes, I believe, from trying to define the undefinable.

Charles Darwin

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

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

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

Now when naturalists observe a close agreement in numerous small details of habits, tastes and dispositions between two or more domestic races, or between nearly-allied natural forms, they use this fact as an argument that all are descended from a common progenitor who was thus endowed; and consequently that all should be classed under the same species. The same argument may be applied with much force to the races of man. As it is improbable that the numerous and unimportant points of resemblance between the several races of man in bodily structure and mental faculties (I do not here refer to similar customs) should all have been independently acquired, they must have been inherited from progenitors who were thus characterised.

Charles Darwin

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

Charles Darwin

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

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