Darwin Quotes


To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real”
  • Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.
  • A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.
  • I love fools’ experiments. I am always making them.
  • How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.
  • I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
  • If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
  • Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
  • It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.
  • In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
  • It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
  • Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.
  • I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

“As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.”
- Quoted in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 1887

 
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