Charles Darwin

"The time will come when it will be thought wonderful that we believed such things about our ancestors."

"Every body of water, no matter how small or apparently insignificant, is a world in itself."

"Believe nothing you have not yourself verified."

"It is the business of the individual to search his own conscience as regards any acts of injustice or cruelty."

"All animals are conscious, and to varying degrees: from the highest animals down to the very lowest."

"I have been studying how I can best invest heavily in the minds of the coming generation."

"A person of mature years and right feeling scarcely ever wants to speak of himself."

"The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely, that man is descended from some lowly organized form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many."

"The intellect becomes clearer and stronger as you take things in and form new combinations."

"It is not the magnitude of the differences, but the SUCCESSION of the differences which is all-important."

"Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind."

"The presence of a need is often the first indication of the solution to that need."

"The gradual accumulation of small modifications, which my theory requires, finds its record in the gradations between the different and the allied forms of life."

"Nature does not proceed by leaps, and therefore, if species have really proceeded from other species by insensibly fine gradations, we ought not to find in that geological formation and in that stratum distinct species."

"I often feel as if my books come half out of me and half out of my books."

"The sight of a feather in the tail of a peacock makes me feel sick and uncomfortable."

"Why should man value himself upon his intelligence, seeing that he shares so little in common with the animals around him?"

"The capacity for this kind of extended and intense study is a mark of genius itself."

"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 members of the same nation."

"Thus man and all other animals have been developed from some prototype so lowly organized that its character cannot be determined."

"It appears to me that nothing can be more important than determining the character of the Creator of the Universe."

"The voyage of the Beagle has been the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career."

"To live under the perpetual superintendence of an all-seeing Being is not conducive to happiness in this life."

"One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die."

"When reading the Gospels, one is continually struck by the difficulty of applying ethical doctrines to modern life."

"Being well-satisfied with the world and with one's place in it is one of the chief ingredients of happiness."

"The formation of different languages and the proofs that they have been developed through gradual steps are curiously parallel to the origin of species."

"A man might go far in medicine by attending carefully to the success and failures of remedies."

"The capacity to blush is peculiar to man, and it is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions of the emotions."

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