Charles Darwin Quotes - Page 3

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

Only the fittest will survive.

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.

In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God ... I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.

An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.

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

Even people who aren’t geniuses can outthink the rest of mankind if they develop certain thinking habits.

We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.

Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.

I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.

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.

Much love much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love.

It is a truly wonderful fact - the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity - that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group.

It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.

Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.

The willing horse is always overworked.

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

An agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.

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

I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects.

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

We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.

He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation ... Man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.

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