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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
Finals
Explain
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...for the shield may be as important for victory, as the sword or spear.
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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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If I had not been so great an invalid, I should not have done so much as I have accomplished.
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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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As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.
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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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Sympathy for the lowest animals is one of the noblest virtues with which man is endowed.
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On seeing the marsupials in Australia for the first time and comparing them to placental mammals: “An unbeliever . . . might exclaim 'Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work'”
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Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!! The devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.
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Man, wonderful man, must collapse, into nature's cauldron, he is no deity, he is no exception.
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I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.
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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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He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation ... Man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.
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There is no fundamental difference between humans and the higher mammalsin their mental faculties
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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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Some few, and I am one of them, even wish to God, though at the loss of millions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery. In the long-run, a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity. Great God! how I should like to see the greatest curse on earth - slavery - abolished!
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Jealousy was plainly exhibited when I fondled a large doll, and when I weighed his infant sister, he being then 15? months old. Seeing how strong a feeling of jealousy is in dogs, it would probably be exhibited by infants at any earlier age than just specified if they were tried in a fitting manner
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The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
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Building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
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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.
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