Charles Darwin

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.

The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.

I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit.

Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world.

The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Fuegians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed into my mind—such were our ancestors.

The love of experiment and the patient observation of nature are the two great qualifications for a naturalist.

We are not to be discouraged by the smallness of the means, but to remember that the greatest results are often produced by the accumulation of small effects.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.

It is a wonderful fact that we can understand so much.

One day, on looking at an orchid, I was struck with the idea that the structure of the flower was adapted to the visits of insects.

I have always maintained that, in this country, a man can do whatever he likes, provided he is a gentleman.

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult—at least I have found it so—than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.

I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, but I have a fair share of invention and of common sense.

The expression of the emotions in man and animals is a study of the utmost interest.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.

I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved, as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.

If a man were to read a book on the cultivation of fruit trees, and then attempt to practice it without having seen a single tree, he would not be more unsuccessful than those who attempt to philosophise on the causes of things without having made any observations.

The fact that I can't remember anything from the first three years of my life is no proof that I wasn't an embryo then.