Building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
I always make special notes about evidence that contradicts me: supportive evidence I can remember without trying.
It is a truly wonderful fact – the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity – that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group.
Only the fittest will survive.
Progress has been much more general than retrogression.
In regard to the amount of difference between the races, we must make some allowance for our nice powers of discrimination gained by a long habit of observing ourselves.
It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain gravity? No one now objects to following out the results consequent on this unknown element of attraction...
When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly forsee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.
Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects.
Sympathy for the lowest animals is one of the noblest virtues with which man is endowed.
The noble science of Geology loses glory from the extreme imperfection of the record. The crust of the earth with its embedded remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum, but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals.
I have been speculating about what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things. As far as I can conjecture, the art consists in habitually searching for the causes and meaning of everything which occurs.
From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows.
The young blush much more freely than the old but not during infancy, which is remarkable, as we know that infants at a very early age redden from passion.
May we not suspect that the vague but very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times?
Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.
It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, about the origin of life; one might as well think about the origin of matter.
Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of facts will certainly reject my theory.
I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things; and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever – much cleverer than the discoverers – never originate anything.