Charles Darwin Quotes - Page 5

From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed. ... To group all facts under some general laws.

The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.

The most energetic workers I have encountered in my world travels are the vegetarian miners of Chile.

... not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.

I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance Huxley

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relationship to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.

That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.

It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain gravity? No one now objects to following out the results consequent on this unknown element of attraction.

I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.

The plow is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man's inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly plowed, and still continues to be thus plowed by earthworms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.

[T]he young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.

I ought, or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.

What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame; the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly.

Nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in a distant country.

Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.

Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves.

We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.

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

At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry.

We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.

Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.

Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.

I conclude that the musical notes and rhythms were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.

I was a young man with uninformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything; and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.