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Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.

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
Sufficient
Instinct
Theory
Simple
Beehive
Making
Beehives
Whole
Overthrow
Instincts
Bees

More quotes by Charles Darwin

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In regard to the amount of difference between the races, we must make some allowance for our nice powers of discrimination gained by a long habit of observing ourselves.
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Formerly Milton's Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton.
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Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.
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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.
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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].
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I shall always feel respect for every one who has written a book, let it be what it may, for I had no idea of the trouble which trying to write common English could cost one—And alas there yet remains the worst part of all correcting the press.
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I have long discovered that geologists never read each other's works, and that the only object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness.
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I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects.
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I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things. As far as I can conjecture the art consists in habitually searching for the causes and meaning of everything which occurs.
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When it was first said that the sun stood still and world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [the voice of the people is the voice of God], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.
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We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.
Charles Darwin
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Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music.
Charles Darwin
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I am actually weary of telling people that I do not pretend to adduce [direct] evidence of one species changing into another, but I believe that this view is in the main correct, because so many phenomena can thus be grouped end explained.
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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As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.
Charles Darwin
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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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With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.
Charles Darwin
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On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.
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In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God ... I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.
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Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have.
Charles Darwin