Quotes by "Charles Darwin"

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate and is sometimes equally convenient.

Light may be shed on man and his origins.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term natural selection.

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the "Survival of the fittest", is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.

As for future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain agnostic.

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague possibilities.

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth

The limit of man s knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

...it appears to me, the doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelyhood pursue.

...But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice... I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.