Explore Quotes by 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.

The world will not be inherited by the strongest, it will be inherited by those most able to change.

For I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.

The most important factor in survival is neither intelligence nor strength but adaptability.

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

Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.

The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. Happiness is never better exhibited than by young animals, such as puppies, kittens, lambs, &c., when playing together, like our own children.

I was a young man with uninformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything; and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.

Sympathy will have been increased through natural selection

As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.

I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very like conscience.

From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of stars in constellations.

The most energetic workers I have encountered in my world travels are the vegetarian miners of Chile.

At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry.

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.

With mammals the male appears to win the female much more through the law of battle than through the display of his charms.

I suppose you are two fathoms deep in mathematics, and if you are, then God help you. For so am I, only with this difference: I stick fast in the mud at the bottom, and there I shall remain.

Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have.

Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!

On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.