Explore Quotes by Charles Darwin

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.

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

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.

It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.

Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.

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.

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.

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.

I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.

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

A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone.

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

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.

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.

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

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

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