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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.

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
Natural
Additions
Give
Descent
Nothing
Miraculous
Giving
Selection
Would
Requires
Absolutely
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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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Farewell Australia! You ... are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect. I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.
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Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.
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Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise and this into astonishment and this into stupefied amazement.
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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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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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The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
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Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a great deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.
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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.
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It has sometimes been said that the success of the Origin proved that the subject was in the air, or that men's minds were prepared for it. I do not think that this is strictly true, for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species.
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It's not the strongest, but the most adaptable that survive.
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The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers.
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I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand. It is not a pleasant place. Amongst the natives there is absent that charming simplicity .... and the greater part of the English are the very refuse of society.
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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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I look at the natural geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved and of each page, only here and there a few lines.
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The presence of a body of well-instructed men, who have not to labor for their daily bread, is important to a degree which cannot be overestimated as all high intellectual work is carried on by them, and on such work material progress of all kinds mainly depends, not to mention other and higher advantages.
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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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Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction for only thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.
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It is not the conscience which raises a blush, for a man may sincerely regret some slight fault committed in solitude, or he may suffer the deepest remorse for an undetected crime, but he will not blush... It is not the sense of guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons the face.
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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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