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 t….

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feedi….

On seeing the marsupials in Australia for the first time and comparing them to placental mammals: “An unbeliever . . . might exclaim 'Surely two dist….

Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

During my second year at Edinburgh [1826-27] I attended Jameson's lectures on Geology and Zoology, but they were incredible dull. The sole effect the….

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

History shows that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, periodically grows too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts th….

Extinction has only separated groups: it has by no means made them; for if every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear, t….

Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle..

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

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure..

When primeval man first used flint stones for any purpose, he would have accidentally splintered them, and would then have used the sharp fragments. Fr….

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence..

I shall always feel respect for every one who has written a book, let it be what it may, for I had no idea of the trouble which trying to write commo….

It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is….

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, a….

In regard to the amount of difference between the races, we must make some allowance for our nice powers of discrimination gained by a long habit of ….

Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius. His brain is absolutely larger, but whether relatively….

Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science..

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by mans attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than the ….

Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions..