False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in prov...
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 called this principle by which each slight variation if useful is preserved by the term natural selection.
False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in provi...
In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
We are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps
Light may be shed on man and his origins.
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 sc...
There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animat...
If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.
What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according...
It is not the strongest of the species that survives,
When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become...
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
As for future life every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.
Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult--at least I have found it so--than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us and I for one must be content to remain agnostic.
Whilst Man, however well-behaved,At best is but a monkey shaved!
But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge , as...