Quotes from Charles Darwin


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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.


A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone.


If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.


What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!


On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.


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


Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.


It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.


How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.


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


My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.


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.


I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.


An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.


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


I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.


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.


Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.


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.


The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.