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Not one change of species into another is on record ... we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.

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
Change
Species
Record
Prove
Records
Single
Changed
Another
Cannot
Fossils

More quotes by Charles Darwin

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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.
Charles Darwin
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I shall always feel respect for every one who has written a book, let it be what it may, for I had no idea of the trouble which trying to write common English could cost one—And alas there yet remains the worst part of all correcting the press.
Charles Darwin
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But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
Charles Darwin
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I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
Charles Darwin
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With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.
Charles Darwin
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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.
Charles Darwin
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Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have.
Charles Darwin
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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.
Charles Darwin
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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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One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
Charles Darwin
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When it was first said that the sun stood still and world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [the voice of the people is the voice of God], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.
Charles Darwin
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People complain of the unequal distribution of wealth [but it is a far greater] injustice that any one man should have the power to write so many brilliant essays... There is no one who writes like [Thomas Huxley].
Charles Darwin
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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.
Charles Darwin
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To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
Charles Darwin
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My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
Charles Darwin
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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.
Charles Darwin
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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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Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.
Charles Darwin
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Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.
Charles Darwin
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Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.
Charles Darwin