Charles Darwin

"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."

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

"The struggle for existence will always be there."

"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."

"A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life."

"There is a grandeur in this view of life."

"I am not at all in a humour for talking; do not you want to say anything to me?"

"The fact that life has evolved out of nearly simple elements is a great truth, readily grasped by an understanding mind."

"The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man."

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

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

"It is not the strongest that survive, but the most adaptable."

"As man advances in civilization, and small tribes unite into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation."

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that people can alter their lives by altering their attitudes."

"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of chromatic and spherical aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."

"Blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions."

"We must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

"I would rather be the offspring of two apes than the possessor of unsatisfied curiosity."

"If I had my life to live over again, I would have made it a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week."

"It is not the arrival at truth that matters, but the search for it."

"The very essence of instinct is that it is followed independently of reason."

"Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds."

"During the voyage of the Beagle I have thought very little about the origin of species."

"Looking far enough ahead, that we may avoid mistakes of the past."

"A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, a mere heart of stone."

"I was a young man with uninformed ideas."

"The capacity to submit oneself to a rigorous test of observation and logic is the essence of science."

"False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long."

"To work on such problems, there was every reason to believe, will always be some of the noblest art of the human intellect."

"We can understand how the same objects may be seen by us in so many different lights."