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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.

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
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Nothing
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It is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing, though so necessary beforehand and so useful afterwards.
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Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have.
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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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That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.
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The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
Charles Darwin
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We fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.
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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.
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I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand. It is not a pleasant place. Amongst the natives there is absent that charming simplicity .... and the greater part of the English are the very refuse of society.
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Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist.
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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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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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The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
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Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.
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The man that created the theory of evolution by natural selection was thrown out by his Dad because he wanted him to be a doctor. GAWD, parents haven't changed much.
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We are optimists, until we are not.
Charles Darwin
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The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead so that passages cannot be seen-this again offers contradiction to constant succession of germs in progress.
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.
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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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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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There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved
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