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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.

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
Like
Wonder
Wildfires
People
Religion
Queries
Young
Uninformed
Ideas
Astonishment
Everything
Threw
Made
Wondering
Men
Suggestions
Time
Took
Wildfire

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From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed. ... To group all facts under some general laws.
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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.
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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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My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
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I am actually weary of telling people that I do not pretend to adduce [direct] evidence of one species changing into another, but I believe that this view is in the main correct, because so many phenomena can thus be grouped end explained.
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In regard to the amount of difference between the races, we must make some allowance for our nice powers of discrimination gained by a long habit of observing ourselves.
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We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.
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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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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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During my second year at Edinburgh [1826-27] I attended Jameson's lectures on Geology and Zoology, but they were incredible dull. The sole effect they produced on me was the determination never as long as I lived to read a book on Geology.
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[Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.
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The assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more powerful than man for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent deity.
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If I had life to live over again, I would give my life to poetry, to music, to literature, and to art to make life richer and happier. In my youth I steeled myself against them and thought them so much waste.
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What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern?
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We are optimists, until we are not.
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I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.
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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.
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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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To my deep mortification my father once said to me, You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.
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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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