Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was a British naturalist renowned for his theory of evolution by natural selection. His seminal work, “On the Origin of Species” (1859), proposed that species evolve over time through the process of natural selection, where advantageous traits are favored for survival and reproduction. Darwin’s theory, developed through extensive research and observations during his voyage on the HMS Beagle, challenged prevailing beliefs about the origin and diversity of life. Despite facing controversy, his ideas reshaped biology and had profound implications across disciplines. Darwin’s legacy as one of the most influential figures in science endures, shaping our understanding of the natural world and sparking ongoing exploration into evolutionary processes.
Charles Darwin Quotes
1. “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.”
— Charles Darwin
2. “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”
— Charles Darwin
3. “Only the fittest will survive.”
— Charles Darwin
4. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
5. “It’s not the strongest, but the most adaptable that survive.”
— Charles Darwin
6. “The most important factor in survival is neither intelligence nor strength but adaptability.”
— Charles Darwin
7. “The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.”
— Charles Darwin
8. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
9. “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
— Charles Darwin
10. “Some call it evolution, And others call it God.”
— Charles Darwin
11. “The world will not be inherited by the strongest, it will be inherited by those most able to change.”
— Charles Darwin
12. “In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.”
— Charles Darwin
13. “Even people who aren’t geniuses can outthink the rest of mankind if they develop certain thinking habits.”
— Charles Darwin
14. “I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men.”
— Charles Darwin
15. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
16. “The most powerful natural species are those that adapt to environmental change without losing their fundamental identity which gives them their competitive advantage.”
— Charles Darwin
17. “Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.”
— Charles Darwin
18. “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a great deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.”
— Charles Darwin
19. “Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”
— Charles Darwin
20. “There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.”
— Charles Darwin
21. “A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there.”
— Charles Darwin
22. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
23. “The willing horse is always overworked.”
— Charles Darwin
24. “Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.”
— Charles Darwin
25. “If every one were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty.”
— Charles Darwin
26. “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
— Charles Darwin
27. “A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.”
— Charles Darwin
28. “Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.”
— Charles Darwin
29. “The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?”
— Charles Darwin
30. “There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved.”
— Charles Darwin
31. “Music was known and understood before words were spoken.”
— Charles Darwin
32. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
33. “Building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.”
— Charles Darwin
34. “Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.”
— Charles Darwin
35. “I have been speculating last night 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.”
— Charles Darwin
36. “I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.”
— Charles Darwin
37. “Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have.”
— Charles Darwin
38. “Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than humans would at first suppose.”
— Charles Darwin
39. “The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason.”
— Charles Darwin
40. “Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.”
— Charles Darwin
41. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
42. “I always make special notes about evidence that contridicts me: supportive evidence I can remember without trying.”
— Charles Darwin
43. “Nature will tell you a direct lie if she can.”
— Charles Darwin
44. “Much love much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love.”
— Charles Darwin
45. “If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
— Charles Darwin
46. “Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.”
— Charles Darwin
47. “Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.”
— Charles Darwin
48. “The normal food of man is vegetable.”
— Charles Darwin
49. “Nothing exists for itself alone, but only in relation to other forms of life.”
— Charles Darwin
50. “The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.”
— Charles Darwin
51. “I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.”
— Charles Darwin
52. “To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.”
— Charles Darwin
53. “Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.”
— Charles Darwin
54. “We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.”
— Charles Darwin
55. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.”
— Charles Darwin
56. “To my deep mortification my father once said to me, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.””
— Charles Darwin
57. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
58. “It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the plan of creation or unity of design, etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact.”
— Charles Darwin
59. “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.”
— Charles Darwin
60. “In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.”
— Charles Darwin
61. “In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.”
— Charles Darwin
62. “The most energetic workers I have encountered in my world travels are the vegetarian miners of Chile.”
— Charles Darwin
63. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
64. “It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter.”
— Charles Darwin
65. “We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.”
— Charles Darwin
66. “An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.”
— Charles Darwin
67. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
68. “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.”
— Charles Darwin
69. “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.”
— Charles Darwin
70. “The question of whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed.”
— Charles Darwin
71. “You will be astonished to find how the whole mental disposition of your children changes with advancing years. A young child and the same when nearly grown, sometimes differ almost as much as do a caterpillar and butterfly.”
— Charles Darwin
72. “I am not the least afraid to die.”
— Charles Darwin
73. “Hence, a traveller should be a botanist, for in all views plants form the chief embellishment.”
— Charles Darwin
74. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
75. “Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely.”
— Charles Darwin
76. “A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.”
— Charles Darwin
77. “With mammals the male appears to win the female much more through the law of battle than through the display of his charms.”
— Charles Darwin
78. “A republic cannot succeed, till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.”
— Charles Darwin
79. “I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.”
— Charles Darwin
80. “I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance Huxley.”
— Charles Darwin
81. “On your life, underestimating the proclivities of finches is likely to lead to great internal hemorrhaging.”
— Charles Darwin
82. “To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.”
— Charles Darwin
83. “Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.”
— Charles Darwin
84. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
85. “Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.”
— Charles Darwin
86. “I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very like conscience.”
— Charles Darwin
87. “It is impossible to concieve of this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity.”
— Charles Darwin
88. “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.”
— Charles Darwin
89. “Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care.”
— Charles Darwin
90. “We have happy days, remember good dinners.”
— Charles Darwin
91. “The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.”
— Charles Darwin
92. “Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.”
— Charles Darwin
93. “Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.”
— Charles Darwin
94. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
95. “As the sense of smell is so intimately connected with that of taste, it is not surprising that an excessively bad odour should excite wretching or vomitting in some persons.”
— Charles Darwin
96. “Daily it is forced home on the mind of the biologist that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of this earth.”
— Charles Darwin
97. “Life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pains about my style of writing.”
— Charles Darwin
98. “I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.”
— Charles Darwin
99. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
100. “Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.”
— Charles Darwin
101. “Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.”
— Charles Darwin
102. “It is like confessing to a murder.”
— Charles Darwin
103. “If I had not been so great an invalid, I should not have done so much as I have accomplished.”
— Charles Darwin
104. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
105. “I conclude that the musical notes and rhythms were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.”
— Charles Darwin
106. “I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects.”
— Charles Darwin
107. “We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.”
— Charles Darwin
108. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
109. “What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern?”
— Charles Darwin
110. “It is easy to specify the individual objects of admiration in these grand scenes; but it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, astonishment, and devotion, which fill and elevate the mind.”
— Charles Darwin
111. “Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions.”
— Charles Darwin
112. “Sympathy for the lowest animals is one of the noblest virtues with which man is endowed.”
— Charles Darwin
113. “I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.”
— Charles Darwin
114. “Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.”
— Charles Darwin
115. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
116. “Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.”
— Charles Darwin
117. “The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man’s ignorance.”
— Charles Darwin
118. “Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion but it would take an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal can blush.”
— Charles Darwin
119. “Progress has been much more general than retrogression.”
— Charles Darwin
120. “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.”
— Charles Darwin
121. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
122. “So great is the economy of Nature, that most flowers which are fertilized by crepuscular or nocturnal insects emit their odor chiefly or exculsively in the evening.”
— Charles Darwin
123. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
124. “The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.”
— Charles Darwin
125. “I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.”
— Charles Darwin
126. “I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.”
— Charles Darwin
127. “Man, wonderful man, must collapse, into nature’s cauldron, he is no deity, he is no exception.”
— Charles Darwin
128. “Sympathy will have been increased through natural selection.”
— Charles Darwin
129. “I long to set foot where no man has trod before.”
— Charles Darwin
130. “Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!! The devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.”
— Charles Darwin
131. “Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.”
— Charles Darwin
132. “Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee and spirituous liqueurs.”
— Charles Darwin
133. “The age-old and noble thought of ‘I will lay down my life to save another,’ is nothing more than cowardice.”
— Charles Darwin
134. “We are optimists, until we are not.”
— Charles Darwin
135. “I feel like an old warhorse at the sound of a trumpet when I read about the capturing of rare beetles.”
— Charles Darwin
136. “I am a firm believer, that without speculation there is no good and original observation.”
— Charles Darwin
137. “It strikes me that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen would know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.”
— Charles Darwin
138. “I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone.”
— Charles Darwin
139. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
140. “It is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing, though so necessary beforehand and so useful afterwards.”
— Charles Darwin
141. “He who understands baboons would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”
— Charles Darwin
142. “One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.”
— Charles Darwin
143. “We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.”
— Charles Darwin
144. “An agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.”
— Charles Darwin
145. “Animals manifestly enjoy excitement, and suffer from annul and may exhibit curiosity.”
— Charles Darwin
146. “If Mozart, instead of playing the pianoforte at three years old with wonderfully little practice, had played a tune with no practice at all, he might truly have been said to have done so instinctively.”
— Charles Darwin
147. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
148. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
149. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
150. “It struck me that favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones tend to be destroyed.”
— Charles Darwin
151. “We may confidently come to the conclusion, that the forces which slowly and by little starts uplift continents, and that those which at successive periods pour forth volcanic matter from open orifices, are identical.”
— Charles Darwin
152. “On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.”
— Charles Darwin
153. “So in regard to mental qualities, their transmission is manifest in our dogs, horses and other domestic animals. Besides special tastes and habits, general intelligence, courage, bad and good tempers. etc., are certainly transmitted.”
— Charles Darwin
154. “Man is developed from an ovule, about 125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals.”
— Charles Darwin
155. “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?”
— Charles Darwin
156. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
157. “Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist.”
— Charles Darwin
158. “The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers.”
— Charles Darwin
159. “I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected facts.”
— Charles Darwin
160. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
161. “Although I am fully convinced of the truth of Evolution, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists. But I look with confidence to the future naturalists, who will be able to view both sides with impartiality.”
— Charles Darwin
162. “If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.”
— Charles Darwin
163. “A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives – of approving of some and disapproving of others.”
— Charles Darwin
164. “When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.”
— Charles Darwin
165. “I shall always feel respect for every one who has written a book, let it be what it may, for I had no idea of the trouble which trying to write common English could cost one – And alas there yet remains the worst part of all correcting the press.”
— Charles Darwin
166. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
167. “Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.”
— Charles Darwin
168. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
169. “It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant.”
— Charles Darwin
170. “A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.”
— Charles Darwin
171. “It has been a bitter mortification for me to digest the conclusion that the “race is for the strong” and that I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in science.”
— Charles Darwin
172. “The instruction at Edinburgh was altogether by lectures, and these were intolerably dull, with the exception of those on chemistry.”
— Charles Darwin
173. “What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame; the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly.”
— Charles Darwin
174. “Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves.”
— Charles Darwin
175. “A cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus.”
— Charles Darwin
176. “Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.”
— Charles Darwin
177. “The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen-this again offers contradiction to constant succession of germs in progress.”
— Charles Darwin
178. “The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.”
— Charles Darwin
179. “What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!”
— Charles Darwin
180. “It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.”
— Charles Darwin
181. “Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.”
— Charles Darwin
182. “As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.”
— Charles Darwin
183. “How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.”
— Charles Darwin
184. “Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.”
— Charles Darwin
185. “Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms.”
— Charles Darwin
186. “I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.”
— Charles Darwin
187. “Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.”
— Charles Darwin
188. “The season of love is that of battle. The roots of these fights run deep.”
— Charles Darwin
189. “It is scarcely possible to doubt that the love of man has become instinctive in the dog.”
— Charles Darwin
190. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
191. “Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of facts will certainly reject my theory.”
— Charles Darwin
192. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
193. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
194. “I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.”
— Charles Darwin
195. “Thomson’s views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.”
— Charles Darwin
196. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
197. “I ought, or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.”
— Charles Darwin
198. “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.”
— Charles Darwin
199. “Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.”
— Charles Darwin
200. “We fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.”
— Charles Darwin
