Charles Darwin Quotes - Page 2

Not one change of species into another is on record ... we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.

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

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

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

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

It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.

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

Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.

This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.

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?

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

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

The normal food of man is vegetable.

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

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

Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps.

Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms.

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

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

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

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 every week.

We are optimists, until we are not.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps

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