25+ Charles Darwin Quotes to Inspire Evolution, Science, and the Wonders of Life
- February 12, 1809 – April 19, 1882
- Born in England (UK)
- Naturalist, geologist, biologist
- Wrote “On the Origin of Species” and proposed the theory of evolution and natural selection
- “How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.”
- “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
- “It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.”
- “I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.”
- “I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.”
- “Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.”
- “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.”
- “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”
- “To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.”
- “We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”
- “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.”
- “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 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.”
- “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.”
- “Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.”
- “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.”
- “Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.”
- “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.”
- “A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.”
- “What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!”
- “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 proving their falseness.”
- “I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.”
- “On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.”
- “A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.”
- “The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason.”
- “I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.”
- “If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
- “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.”