Charles Darwin Quotes

"Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress"

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

"The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic."

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

"See. It's just a theory!"

"The evolution of the human race will not be accomplished in the ten thousand years of tame animals, but in the million years of wild animals, because man is and will always be a wild animal."

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"The highest stage in moral ure at which we can arrive is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts."