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.
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.