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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.

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
Earth
Corner
Much
Corners
Would
Strikes
Like
Field
Structure
Acre
Fields
Scratching
Hundred
Hens
Knowledge
Acres

More quotes by Charles Darwin

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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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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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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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This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.
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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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I trust and believe that the time spent in this voyage ... will produce its full worth in Natural History and it appears to me the doing what little we can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue.
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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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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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Sympathy for the lowest animals is one of the noblest virtues with which man is endowed.
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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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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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Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist.
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Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us - of their imagined approbation or disapprobation.
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Progress has been much more general than retrogression
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A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.
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The most powerful natural species are those that adapt to environmental change without losing their fundamental identity which gives them their competitive advantage.
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It occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made of this question (the origin of the species) by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it
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A cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus.
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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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The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.
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