Quote

Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull & undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind.

Charles Darwin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Great
Imperfect
Breathed
Swim
Skull
Pleasant
Undoubtedly
Evolution
Skulls
Mankind
Tail
Hermaphrodite
Animal
Tails
Hermaphrodites
Water
Ancestor
Genealogy
Science
Swimming
Bladder

More quotes by Charles Darwin

Image
Blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal could blush.
Charles Darwin
Image
Building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
Charles Darwin
Image
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
Image
What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly.
Charles Darwin
Image
Nothing exists for itself alone, but only in relation to other forms of life
Charles Darwin
Image
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.
Charles Darwin
Image
Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have.
Charles Darwin
Image
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.
Charles Darwin
Image
The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
Charles Darwin
Image
...I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.β€” Let each man hope & believe what he can.β€”
Charles Darwin
Image
Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.
Charles Darwin
Image
A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.
Charles Darwin
Image
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.
Charles Darwin
Image
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.
Charles Darwin
Image
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
Image
Not one change of species into another is on record ... we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.
Charles Darwin
Image
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.
Charles Darwin
Image
Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.
Charles Darwin
Image
On seeing the marsupials in Australia for the first time and comparing them to placental mammals: β€œAn unbeliever . . . might exclaim 'Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work'”
Charles Darwin
Image
There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.
Charles Darwin