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I have steadily endeavored to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as the facts are shown to be opposed to it.

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
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Steadily
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Soon
Forming
Giving
However
Skepticism
Much
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Science
Shown
Facts
Opposed
Keep
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More quotes by Charles Darwin

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I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
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The earthquake, however, must be to every one a most impressive event: the earth, considered from our earliest childhood as the type of solidity, has oscillated like a thin crust beneath our feet and in seeing the laboured works of man in a moment overthrown, we feel the insignificance of his boasted power.
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Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.
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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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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.
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Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music.
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My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
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We may confidently come to the conclusion, that the forces which slowly and by little starts uplift continents, and that those which at successive periods pour forth volcanic matter from open orifices, are identical.
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It is scarcely possible to doubt that the love of man has become instinctive in the dog.
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I think it can be shown that there is such an unerring power at work in Natural Selection, which selects exclusively for the good of each organic being.
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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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I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture.
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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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What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!
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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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That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.
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...for the shield may be as important for victory, as the sword or spear.
Charles Darwin
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A bad earthquake at once destroys the oldest associations: the world, the very emblem of all that is solid, has moved beneath our feet like a crust over a fluid one second of time has conveyed to the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would never have created.
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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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We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.
Charles Darwin