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A surprising number [of novels] have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily-against which a law ought to be passed.

Charles Darwin

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Charles Darwin
Age: 73 †
Born: 1809
Born: February 12
Died: 1882
Died: April 19
Beekeeper
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The Mount
Shrewsbury
Charles Robert Darwin
Charles R. Darwin
Darwin
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More quotes by Charles Darwin

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I ought, or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.
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It is scarcely possible to doubt that the love of man has become instinctive in the dog.
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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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A bad earthquake at once destroys the oldest associations: the world, the very emblem of all that is solid, has moved beneath our feet like a crust over a fluid one second of time has conveyed to the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would never have created.
Charles Darwin
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We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.
Charles Darwin
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The age-old and noble thought of 'I will lay down my life to save another,' is nothing more than cowardice.
Charles Darwin
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You ask about my opinion on vivisection. I quite agree that it is justifiable for real investigations on physiology but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.
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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Building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
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In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God ... I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.
Charles Darwin
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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?
Charles Darwin
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The most important factor in survival is neither intelligence nor strength but adaptability.
Charles Darwin
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We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.
Charles Darwin
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Man is developed from an ovule, about 125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals.
Charles Darwin
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I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
Charles Darwin
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Language is an art, like brewing or baking.... It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt.
Charles Darwin
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I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.
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
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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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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.
Charles Darwin