Charles Darwin

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognise that we ought to control our thoughts.

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

I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of others.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

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.

The expression of the emotions in man and animals is a subject of general interest.

It is a truly wonderful fact that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in groups subordinate to groups, in the manner which we everywhere see—namely, varieties of the same species most closely related, then species of the same genus less closely and unequally related, and so on, as we ascend in the scale.

The more we learn of the fixed laws of nature, the more incredible do miracles become.

I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

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

We are all born with a certain amount of self-will, and we must learn to control it.

I have tried to show that the social instincts, — the prime principle of man's moral constitution, — with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule, 'As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise;' and this lies at the foundation of morality.

The strongest argument for the existence of God, as far as I can discover, is the existence of conscience.

It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.

The natural system is a genealogical arrangement, with the acquired differences superadded.

I have no doubt that in the future, the theory of evolution will be universally accepted.

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

When I was on board the Beagle I believed in what I may call the orthodox dogma, and I can remember the exact spot in my mind, when I ceased to believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, though I can hardly remember the exact time.

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.