Charles Darwin

"The possibility of making great discoveries still remains."

"I feel most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too profound for the human intellect."

"By the time one is seventy, one has learned the lesson how to live; but that is perhaps the only time it becomes real to one."

"Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into astounded amazement."

"The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts."

"I have therefore nothing to do but to proceed with my work."

"The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!"

"The Fuegians rank amongst the most extraordinary and curious people in the world."

"Even the most perfect knowledge, if acted on for selfish purposes, may work more ill than good."

"There is something beneath the surface that prompts all our actions."

"The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want right now."

"To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact."

"This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection."

"Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows."

"In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches."

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

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth."

"Man tends to increase at a rate that his means of subsistence cannot support."

"The wonderful fact that all animals and all plants are descended from some one prototype."

"Who would believe that in the works of Nature we only find beauty and harmony?"

"It is those who have but little to do, and have all their mental powers at full command, who suffer most from spleen and irritability."

"But a naturalist might say 'Seeing that Nature does not make jumps' he ought systematically to arrange organic beings as thus produced."

"Unhappily the world has always been prone to lose the very knowledge that is most important to it."

"The variations which we regard as individual differences are of the highest importance for us."

"It seemed to me almost certain that if the Malthusian theory in regard to physical life were true, then it must be true also with regard to the moral and intellectual faculties of man."

"I was not able to work all day with vigour for more than a couple of hours daily."

"We must not fall into the error of supposing that the whole of the organisations of each race has been produced by natural selection."

"He is not to be wise in the things of this world who is not equally wise in the things of the next."

"It must strike every one that the members of such an assemblage of authors are quite modern."

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