It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.
I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very like conscience.
Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.
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.
Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.
Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.
The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.
Nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in a distant country.
Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.
A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.
How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.
On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.
The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason.
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.
Much love, much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love.
We have happy days, remember good dinners.
It is scarcely possible to doubt that the love of man has become instinctive in the dog.
It strikes me that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen would know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.
Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.