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

Charles Darwin

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Charles Darwin
Age: 73 †
Born: 1809
Born: February 12
Died: 1882
Died: April 19
Beekeeper
Botanist
Carcinologist
Entomologist
Ethologist
Explorer
Geologist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Travel Writer
The Mount
Shrewsbury
Charles Robert Darwin
Charles R. Darwin
Darwin
Good
Fact
Inspirational
Transcendentalism
Facts
Establishing
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Error
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Errors
Better
Service
Sometimes
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Even
Kill

More quotes by Charles Darwin

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...I believe there exists, & I feel within me, an instinct for the truth, or knowledge or discovery, of something of the same nature as the instinct of virtue, & that our having such an instinct is reason enough for scientific researches without any practical results ever ensuing from them.
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During my second year at Edinburgh [1826-27] I attended Jameson's lectures on Geology and Zoology, but they were incredible dull. The sole effect they produced on me was the determination never as long as I lived to read a book on Geology.
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We are optimists, until we are not.
Charles Darwin
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Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.
Charles Darwin
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The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?
Charles Darwin
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I fully subscribe to the judgement of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animal, the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important....It is the most noble of all the attributes of man.
Charles Darwin
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I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.
Charles Darwin
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The instruction at Edinburgh was altogether by lectures, and these were intolerably dull, with the exception of those on chemistry.
Charles Darwin
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Who when examining in the cabinet of the entomologist the gay and exotic butterflies, and singular cicadas, will associate with these lifeless objects, the ceaseless harsh music of the latter, and the lazy flight of the former - the sure accompaniments of the still, glowing noonday of the tropics.
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It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.
Charles Darwin
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It may be doubted that there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly organized creatures.
Charles Darwin
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I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever - much cleverer than the discoverers - never originate anything.
Charles Darwin
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Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.
Charles Darwin
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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.
Charles Darwin
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To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree
Charles Darwin
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Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of facts will certainly reject my theory.
Charles Darwin
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What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly.
Charles Darwin
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Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us - of their imagined approbation or disapprobation.
Charles Darwin
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Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.
Charles Darwin
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Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd [should] be forestalled ... I never saw a more striking coincidence. If Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters.
Charles Darwin