Life Quotes

Sexual selection acts in a less rigorous manner than natural selection. The latter produces its effects by the life or death at all ages of the more or less successful individuals.

It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain the what is the essence of the attraction of gravity?

And thus, the forms of life throughout the universe become divided into groups subordinate to groups.

Nevertheless it is probable that the hearing rather early in life such views maintained and praised may have favoured my upholding them under a different form in my 'Origin of Species.

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. There is grandeur in this view of life.

All that at present can be said with certainty, is that, as with the individual, so with the species, the hour of life has run its course, ans is spent.

There is grandeur in this view of life... [in which] endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

If numerous species, belonging to the same genera or families, have really started into life all at once, the fact would be fatal to the theory of descent with slow modification through natural selection.

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

If then we have under nature variability and a powerful agent always ready to act and select, why should we doubt that variations in any way useful to beings, under their excessively complex relations of life, would be preserved, accumulated, and inherited?

How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one organic being to another being, been perfected?

It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter.

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.

Much love much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love.

How so many absurd rules of conduct, as well as so many absurd religious beliefs, have originated, we do not know; nor how it is that they have become, in all quarters of the world, so deeply impressed on the minds of men; but it is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, while the brain is impressionable, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason.

Nothing is permanent in this wicked world - not even our troubles.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

What do you want meaning for? Life is desire, not meaning.

I suppose that's one of the ironies of life doing the wrong thing at the right moment.

This is a ruthless world and one must be ruthless to cope with it.