Quotes from Charles Darwin

There is continuity between humans and other animals in their emotional lives; there are transitional stages among species, not large gaps; and the differences among many animals are differences in degree rather than in kind

Species that struggle to adapt to survive will become extinct

When we descend to details we can prove that no one species has changed; nor can we prove that the supposed changes are beneficial, which is the groundwork of the theory.

to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest.

On the other hand, I am not very sceptical,—a frame of mind which I believe to be injurious to the progress of science. A good deal of scepticism in a scientific man is advisable to avoid much loss of time, but I have met with not a few men, who, I feel sure, have often thus been deterred from experiment or observations, which would have proved directly or indirectly serviceable.

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; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling 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.

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

Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care.

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men

Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a great deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.

Jacob Bronowski

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

We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.

Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.

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

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

I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance Huxley

Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.

The main conclusion here arrived at ... is that man is descended from some less highly organized form.

Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.

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.