Charles Darwin

"Nature will tell you a direct lie if she is given a chance."

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

"I am convinced that nature has written some of her noblest characters on women's hearts."

"Looking at nature, it is clear that with increasing geographical range comes ever increasing insignificance."

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

"The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through gradual steps, are curiously parallel."

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

"I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey as from a man who uses great faculties to obscure the truth."

"It seems to me that nothing can be more important than determining the character of the Creator, whether He is wise, powerful and just."

"The discovery of new things demands the most careful observation and patient investigation."

"It is not the critic who counts; it is the man actually in the arena."

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

"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."

"There is a grandeur in this view of life that, whilst my eyes range over the endless combinations and changes which surround us, I feel that I am a very insignificant part."

"The mind of man, once stretched by a new experience, never returns to its original dimensions."

"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."

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

"It strikes me that all our knowledge begins with wonder."

"In the long history of humankind, those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed."

"We are not here on this Earth to accumulate riches and to wear fine clothes, but to perform great and wonderful works."

"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery."

"Whilst standing in the midst of such grandeur, I felt convinced that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body."

"The survival of the fittest is more accurately the survival of the form of social organization that is best suited to the surrounding environment."

"I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved, the moment facts are shown to be opposed to it."

"The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude."

"My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding out general laws out of large collections of facts."

"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."

"There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows."

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

"I cannot believe that the Almighty would have started me off and then left the affair entirely to chance and to the work of what would be secondary causes."