Charles Darwin Quotes

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Every morning during certain seasons of the year, the thrushes and blackbirds on all the lawns throughout the country draw out of their holes an astonishing number of worms; and this they could not do, unless they lay close to the surface.

Charles Darwin
We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.

Charles Darwin
I have rarely read anything which has interested me more, though I have not read as yet more than a quarter of the book proper. From quotations which I had seen, I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.

Charles Darwin
Dr. Grant took me occasionally to the meetings of the Wernerian Society, where various papers on natural history were read, discussed, and afterwards published in the 'Transactions.' I heard Audubon deliver there some interesting discourses on the habits of N. American birds, sneering somewhat unjustly at Waterton. By the way, a negro lived in Edinburgh, who had travelled with Waterton, and gained his livelihood by stuffing birds, which he did excellently: he gave me lessons for payment, and I used often to sit with him, for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man.

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

Charles Darwin
Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

Charles Darwin
A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

Charles Darwin
I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

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
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
That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.

Charles Darwin
This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.

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

Charles Darwin
A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin
A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that he created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that he required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of his laws.

Charles Darwin
One has, however, no business to feel so much surprise of one's ignorance, when one knows how impossible it is without statistics to conjecture the duration of life and percentage of deaths to births in mankind.

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

Charles Darwin
If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

Charles Darwin
But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.

Charles Darwin
Your question what would convince me of Design is a poser. If I saw an angel come down to teach us good, and I was convinced from others seeing him that I was not mad, I should believe in design.

Charles Darwin
It is scarcely possible to doubt that the love of man has become instinctive in the dog.

Charles Darwin
It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers.

Charles Darwin