We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.
Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.
The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man’s ignorance.
With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.
If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.
The season of love is that of battle. The roots of these fights run deep.
If I had life to live over again, I would give my life to poetry, to music, to literature, and to art to make life richer and happier. In my youth I steeled myself against them and thought them so much waste.
I ought, or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.
The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
I have long discovered that geologists never read each other’s works, and that the only object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness.
I feel like an old warhorse at the sound of a trumpet when I read about the capturing of rare beetles.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change, that lives within the means available and works co-operatively against common threats.
I think it can be shown that there is such an unerring power at work in Natural Selection, which selects exclusively for the good of each organic being.
Life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pains about my style of writing.
Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps.
The willing horse is always overworked.
A novel according to my taste, does not come into the moderately good class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love – and if a pretty woman, all the better.
Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for only thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.
We are optimists, until we are not.
The man that created the theory of evolution by natural selection was thrown out by his Dad because he wanted him to be a doctor. GAWD, parents haven’t changed much.