I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men.
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.
Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.
Nothing exists for itself alone, but only in relation to other forms of life.
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.
A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.
Man, in his arrogance, thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a great deity. It is more humble, and I believe true, to consider him as created from animals.
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.