Charles Darwin

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

A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life.
– Charles Darwin

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
– Charles Darwin

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.
– Charles Darwin

The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely, that man is descended from some lowly organized form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.
– Charles Darwin

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week.
– Charles Darwin

A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.
– Charles Darwin

An American Monkey after getting drunk on Brandy would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.
– Charles Darwin

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

Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he
now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to
complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress. To those who fully admit the immortality of the human soul, the destruction of our world will not appear so dreadful.
– Charles Darwin

Each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ratio… each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction… The vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.
– Charles Darwin

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.
– Charles Darwin

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us. And I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.
– Charles Darwin

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

Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.
– Charles Darwin

I feel most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.
– Charles Darwin

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.
– Charles Darwin

The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage
progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilization, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people.
– Charles Darwin

A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.
– Charles Darwin

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

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain
language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.
– Charles Darwin

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely: Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
– Charles Darwin

The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
– Charles Darwin

I have rarely read anything which has interested me more, though I have not read as yet
more than a quarter of the book proper. From quotations which I had seen, I had a high
notion of Aristotle’s merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.
– Charles Darwin

Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole
theory.
– Charles Darwin

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.
– Charles Darwin

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
– Charles Darwin

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment.
– Charles Darwin

It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
– Charles Darwin

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
– Charles Darwin

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as,
consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.
– Charles Darwin

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

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great
is our sin.
– Charles Darwin

I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through
natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which
stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will
naturally suffer most.
– Charles Darwin

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control
our thoughts.
– Charles Darwin

I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men. I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free.
– Charles Darwin

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world,
every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
– Charles Darwin

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.
– Charles Darwin

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that 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.
– Charles Darwin

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

It is the very essence of the human mind to inquire after the causes of whatever happens in this world of ours.
– Charles Darwin

Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere
damnable and detestable curiosity.
– Charles Darwin

A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honor.
– Charles Darwin

There is good evidence that the art of shooting with bows and arrows has not been handed down from any common progenitor of mankind, yet as Westropp and Nilsson have remarked, the stone arrow-heads, brought from the most distant parts of the world, and manufactured at the most remote periods, are almost identical; and this fact can only be accounted for by the various races having similar inventive or mental powers.
– Charles Darwin

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we would expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.
– Charles Darwin

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.
– Charles Darwin