AMAZING AND FAMOUS CHARLES DARWIN QUOTES
1) ”A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”
2) ”We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.”
3) I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone.
4) ”A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.”
5) ”In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
6) ”False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.”
7) ”It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.”
8) ”How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.”
9) ”We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”
10) ”I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.”
11) ”If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
12) ”Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits..”
13) ”The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.”
14) ”What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!.”
15) ”We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.”
16) ”Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.”
17) ”I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone.”
18) ”Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.”
19) ”Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.”
20) ”There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.”
21) ”It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change..”
22) ”A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives – of approving of some and disapproving of others.”
23) ”To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.”
24) ”Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.’
25) ”It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
26) ”I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.”
27) ”I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the team of natural selection.”
28) ”Keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase, that each at some period of its life, has the struggle for life, and suffer great destruction. The war of nature is not incessant. The vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.”
29) ”The survival of preservation of certain favored words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.”
30) ”If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
31) ”One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and weakest die.”
32) ”This preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call natural selection or the survival of the fittest.”
33) ”The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
34) ”I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.”
35) ”Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.”
36) ”Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.”
37) ”The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.”
38) ”I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men.”
39) ”A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.”
40) ”On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.”
41) ”I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.”
42) ”My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.”
43) ”The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.”
44) ”Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.”
45) ”Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.”
46) ”Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge..”
47) ”If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.”
48) ”Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”
49) ”Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. 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.”
50) ”If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
51) ”We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.”
52) ”The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.”
53) ”The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.”
54) ”The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
55) ”Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.”
56) ”Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.”
57) ”One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.”
58) ”Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.”
59) ”We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”
60) ”As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.”’
61) ”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.”
62) ”But I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.”
63) ”Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.”
64) ”Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult–at least I have found it so–than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.”
65) ”If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.”
66) ”Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.”
67) ”I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone..”
68) ”Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble, and I believe truer, to consider him created from animals..”
69) ”Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.’‘
70) ”There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.”
71) ”To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.”
72) ”It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.”
73) ”I am not the least afraid to die.”
74) ”To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree…The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory.”
75) ”We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.”
76) ”False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.”
77) ”we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps.”
78) ”The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason.”
79) ”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.”
80) ”We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.”
81) ”A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.”
82) ”Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!”
83) ”I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most.”
84) ”Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.”
85) ”In conclusion, it appears that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries.”
86) ”The question of whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed.”
87) ”But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.”
88) ”Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.”
89) ”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, 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 serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.”
90) ”False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.”
91) ”Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult – at least I have found it so – than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind…We behold the face of nature bright with gladness…We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects and seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life.”
92) ”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.”
93) ”But a plant on the edge of a deserts is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent upon the moisture.”
94) ”If I had my life to live over again, I would make it a rule to read some poetry, listen to some music, and see some painting or drawing at least once a week, for perhaps the part of my brain now atrophied would then have been kept alive through life. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.”
95) ”As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates; so that we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of any one country, although on the ordinary view supposed to have been specially created and adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the naturalized productions from another land..”’
96) ”I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think there is an eminently important difference.”
97) ”Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.”
98) ”One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.”
99) ”But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?”
100) ”I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.”
101) ”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 labored works of man in a moment overthrown, we feel the insignificance of his boasted power.”
102) ”I had also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely that whenever published fact, a new observation of thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones.”
103) ”A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.”
104) ”This preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.”
