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False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.

Charles Darwin

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Charles Darwin
Age: 73 †
Born: 1809
Born: February 12
Died: 1882
Died: April 19
Beekeeper
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The Mount
Shrewsbury
Charles Robert Darwin
Charles R. Darwin
Darwin
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More quotes by Charles Darwin

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The love of a dog for his master is notorious in the agony of death he has been known to caress his master, and everyone has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator this man, unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour of his life.
Charles Darwin
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Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.
Charles Darwin
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In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.
Charles Darwin
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It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant.
Charles Darwin
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It strikes me that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen would know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.
Charles Darwin
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People complain of the unequal distribution of wealth [but it is a far greater] injustice that any one man should have the power to write so many brilliant essays... There is no one who writes like [Thomas Huxley].
Charles Darwin
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Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.
Charles Darwin
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It occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made of this question (the origin of the species) by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it
Charles Darwin
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Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval [tropical] forests, ... temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature. No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.
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The Times is getting more detestable (but that is too weak word) than ever.
Charles Darwin
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A language, like a species, when extinct, never... reappears.
Charles Darwin
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My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
Charles Darwin
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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 spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
Charles Darwin
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Nature will tell you a direct lie if she can.
Charles Darwin
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...one doubts existence of free will [because] every action determined by heredity, constitution, example of others or teaching of others. This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything...nor ought one to blame others.
Charles Darwin
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Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist.
Charles Darwin
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Farewell Australia! You ... are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect. I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.
Charles Darwin
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Building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
Charles Darwin
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Jealousy was plainly exhibited when I fondled a large doll, and when I weighed his infant sister, he being then 15? months old. Seeing how strong a feeling of jealousy is in dogs, it would probably be exhibited by infants at any earlier age than just specified if they were tried in a fitting manner
Charles Darwin
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So in regard to mental qualities, their transmission is manifest in our dogs, horses and other domestic animals. Besides special tastes and habits, general intelligence, courage, bad and good tempers. etc., are certainly transmitted.
Charles Darwin