I suppose you are two fathoms deep in mathematics, and if you are, then God help you. For so am I, only with this difference: I stick fast in the mud at the bottom, and there I shall remain.
It may be conceit, but I believe the subject will interest the public, and I am sure that the views are original.
I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.
I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.
I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.
When the sexes differ in beauty, in the power of singing, or in producing what I have called instrumental music, it is almost invariably the male which excels the female.
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.
The most energetic workers I have encountered in my world travels are the vegetarian miners of Chile.
The normal food of man is vegetable.
It may be doubted that there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly organized creatures.
If I had not been so great an invalid, I should not have done so much as I have accomplished.
Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist.
Even people who aren’t geniuses can outthink the rest of mankind if they develop certain thinking habits.
It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.
A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die – which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.
The most important factor in survival is neither intelligence nor strength but adaptability.
Sympathy will have been increased through natural selection.
From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of stars in constellations.
There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved.
Man himself cannot express love and humility by external signs, so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous body, and wagging tail, he meets his beloved master.