Charles Darwin

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

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.

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

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.

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

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

I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent design, or indeed of design of any kind, in the details.

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.

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.

I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.

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

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 impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God.

Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follows from the advance of science.

I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men... I am therefore a poor critic.

The gradual diffusion of Darwinism.

The extinction of species has been involved in the most gratuitous mystery.

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 am a firm believer that without speculation there is no good and original observation.