Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.
Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us – of their imagined approbation or disapprobation.
An agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.
Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.
But Geology carries the day: it is like the pleasure of gambling, speculating, on first arriving, what the rocks may be; I often mentally cry out 3 to 1 Tertiary against primitive; but the latter have hitherto won all the bets.
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.
As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.
Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult – at least I have found it so – than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.
To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.
Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms.
An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.
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.
Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care.
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.
The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and thus biology is in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory. Is it then a science or faith?
My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures.
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.