Quote collection
395 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"It is impossible to concieve of this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity."
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
"In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history."
"In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment."
"The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."
"Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle."
"I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men"
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
"It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself."
"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."
"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."
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla."
"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."
"Not one change of species into another is on record ... we cannot prove that a single species has been changed."
"Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal."
"That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection."
"An agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind."
"In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed."
"Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory."