Quotes from Charles Darwin

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

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

Till facts are grouped & called there can be no prediction. The only advantage of discovering laws is to foretell what will happen & to see bearing of scattered facts.

If every one were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty.

The limit of man s knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination.

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

[Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.

To my deep mortification my father once said to me, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."

...all nature is perverse & will not do as I wish it.

The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen-this again offers contradiction to constant succession of germs in progress.

About weak points [of the Origin] I agree. The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known gradations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder.

It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.

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.

There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved

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

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

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

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

... probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed.

It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter.

The age-old and noble thought of 'I will lay down my life to save another,' is nothing more than cowardice.

Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.

Sympathy for the lowest animals is one of the noblest virtues with which man is endowed.

Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions.