Charles Darwin Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

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.

It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.

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.

The question of whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed.

The most powerful natural species are those that adapt to environmental change without losing their fundamental identity which gives them their competitive advantage.

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

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.

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.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling 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.

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

As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates; so that we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of any one country, although on the ordinary view supposed to have been specially created and adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the naturalised productions from another land.

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

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.

On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.

A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.

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

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

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

It has been a bitter mortification for me to digest the conclusion that the "race is for the strong" and that I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in science.

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

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

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

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

Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system- with all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.