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I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever - much cleverer than the discoverers - never originate anything.

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
Things
Last
Perplexing
Never
Science
Cleverer
Men
Makes
Undiscovered
Night
Originate
Problem
Clever
Anything
Intellect
Discoverers
Many
Discovery
Discoverer
Much
Lasts
Speculating

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If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.
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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.
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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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Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.
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To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree
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One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.
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What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly.
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He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation ... Man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.
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The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?
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A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones
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It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another...we consider those, where the intellectual faculties most developed as the highest. - A bee doubtless would [use] ... instincts as a criteria.
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If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
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Great is the power of steady misrepresentation but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.
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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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[Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.
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I was a young man with uninformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.
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You will be astonished to find how the whole mental disposition of your children changes with advancing years. A young child and the same when nearly grown, sometimes differ almost as much as do a caterpillar and butterfly.
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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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But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice.
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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.
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