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The impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God.

Charles Darwin

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Charles Darwin
Age: 73 †
Born: 1809
Born: February 12
Died: 1882
Died: April 19
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The Mount
Shrewsbury
Charles Robert Darwin
Charles R. Darwin
Darwin
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A language, like a species, when extinct, never... reappears.
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Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
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The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.
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I always make special notes about evidence that contridicts me: supportive evidence I can remember without trying.
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The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers.
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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.
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There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures.
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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.
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It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
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I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.
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[Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.
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On the theory of natural selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, “Natura non facit saltum.” This canon, if we look only to the present inhabitants of the world, is not strictly correct, but if we include all those of past times, it must by my theory be strictly true.
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It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.
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The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
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The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by mans attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than the woman. Whether deep thought, reason, or imagination or merely the use of the senses and hands.....We may also infer.....The average mental power in man must be above that of woman.
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It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.
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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.
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The instruction at Edinburgh was altogether by lectures, and these were intolerably dull, with the exception of those on chemistry.
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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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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.
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