Quotes from Charles Darwin

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.

I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.

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

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

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

And hail their queen, fair regent of the night.

Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist.

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

Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God.

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us and I for one must be content to remain agnostic.

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

Farewell Australia! You ... are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect. I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

It strikes me that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen would know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.

It is not the biggest, the brightest or the best that will survive, but those who adapt the quickest.

Nothing exists for itself alone, but only in relation to other forms of life

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.

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.

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

The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?

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.

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree