Quotes By Charles Darwin

Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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