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

More quotes by Charles Darwin

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Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.
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I fully subscribe to the judgement of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animal, the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important....It is the most noble of all the attributes of man.
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Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.
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And hail their queen, fair regent of the night.
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He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.
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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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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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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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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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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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I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.
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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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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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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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The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.
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Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification it can act only by very short steps.
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We fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.
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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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...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.— Let each man hope & believe what he can.—
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Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.
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