Quotes by Charles Darwin

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The highest stage of moral culture occurs when we realize that we can control our own thoughts.

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The man who decided to waste even an hour of his time has not yet come to understand the value of life.

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The pangs of conscience caused by remorse and the sense of duty are the most important differences between man and animal.

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If I remember how fiercely the representatives of the church attacked me, it seems funny that I myself once intended to become a priest.

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Ignorance is always more certain than knowledge, and only the ignorant can say with certainty that the sciences will never be able to solve any problem.

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There is nothing more unbearable than inactivity.

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Never befriend a man you cannot respect.

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Talks of glory, honor, pleasure and wealth are paltry compared to love.

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The strongest difference between humans and animals is moral sense or consciousness. And her dominance is expressed in the short but powerful very expressive word "must".

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The ability to blush is the most characteristic and human of all human characteristics.

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The natural scientists who profess the old views stick to the biblical understanding, the doctrine of the Mosaic creation story, and based on its chronological basis, they consider both the world and humanity to be only 5,000-6,000 years old. There are also those who calculate not only the year of creation, but also the month and day. Others also believe that they know what the ancient patriarchs' physical attributes were like, e.g. The French academic Henrion calculated that Adam was 27 meters tall, Abraham 9 meters tall, while Moses was only 3 meters tall - and he strongly proved this at the French academy.

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Since lakes and river systems are separated by a barrier of land, one might think that freshwater organisms are not widely distributed within a region. And since the sea seems to them to be an even more difficult obstacle to overcome, we can also believe that these creatures did not reach distant lands. In fact, the opposite is true.

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If everyone were cast in the same mold, there would be no beauty.

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This is an uplifting idea, according to which the Creator breathed life with its various powers into a few or only one form originally, and while our planet revolved round and round following the immutable law of gravitation, from this simple beginning an infinite variety, wonderful and beautiful form developed - and still does today.

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It is an interesting thing to stand by an overgrown shore covered with a variety of plants, birds singing in the bushes, insects flying in the air, and worms crawling in the moist earth, and wondering how all these delicately arranged forms, so different, and which are so they depend on each other in a complicated way, they were created one by one by laws that still operate around us today.

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How convenient it is to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "the plan of creation," "the unity of the plan," and the like, and to think that we have thereby explained something, when we have only repeated the fact.

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The survival or preservation of certain preferred words in the struggle for existence is a case of natural selection.

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Some general law leading to the development of living beings (...) sounds like this: multiply, change, let the strong live, the weak perish.

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Anyone who can waste an hour uselessly has not yet realized how precious life is.

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One conscientiously and carefully studies the character and pedigree of one's horses, cattle, and dogs before mating them; but when it comes to his own marriage, he never or rarely makes such an effort.

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A mathematician is a blind man looking in a dark room for a black cat that is not there.

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If the suffering of the poor is not caused by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, our sin is great.

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Psychology, no doubt, will rest on the foundations laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that is, on the principle that mental powers and abilities were necessarily acquired only gradually.

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Ignorance leads to self-righteousness more often than knowledge: those who know little, rather than those who know a lot, tend to declare emphatically that science will never solve this or that.

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Extinction merely demarcated the groups, but by no means created them. If all the forms that have ever lived on Earth were to suddenly reappear, even though it would be impossible to define the groups, a kind of natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would still be possible.

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What limit could be set to a power that works through long ages and strictly examines the constitution, constitution and habits of every being: it favors the good and rejects the bad? I don't see that anything could limit this power in slowly and beautifully adapting all living forms to even the most complicated living conditions.

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It challenges the imagination to believe that the peacock's tail evolved this way; and since I believe it, therefore I believe in the same principle, somewhat modified, applied to man.

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We believe that there is no more wonderful part of the plant in terms of its function than the root tip, (...) which bears witness to so many sensitivities. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the root apex with so many abilities, which also controls the movement of the parts connected to it, works like the brain of lower animals.

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We see the face of nature serenely radiant, and sometimes meet with an overabundance of food; but we do not see or forget that the birds chirping carelessly around us live chiefly on insects and seeds, and so are constantly destroying life; or we forget the extent to which these singers and their eggs and young are destroyed by other birds and predators.

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Women all over the world are aware of the value of their beauty, and when they have the means to do so, they take much more pleasure in beautifying themselves than men.

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The more we learn about the solid laws of nature, the more incredible the miracles become.

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However slow the process of selection may be, if even a weak man can achieve so much by artificial selection, I do not see what could set a limit to that change, that mutual adaptation between living beings and the passage of time to the physical conditions of life, and the beauty and of its complexity, which is created over a long period of time through the selection force of nature, i.e. the survival of the fittest.

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There is something ineffable about living under the open sky.

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The inanimate forces of nature - rocks, ice, snow, wind and water, eternally at war with each other, but still allied against man - (...) are in perfect supremacy.

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With the exception of fools, men differ not so much in their intellect as in their enthusiasm and zeal.

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Unless we close our eyes, we can pretty much know where we come from based on what we know today; and in this respect we have nothing to be ashamed of. Even the lowest organism is something far nobler than the inorganic dust beneath our feet; no man blessed with an impartial mind can examine a living being, however humble, without being touched by its magnificent structure and wonderful qualities.

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No one can be a good observer without being an active theorist.

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How easy it is not to notice a phenomenon, no matter how striking it is, if someone in front of us didn't notice it!

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Science is nothing more than the grouping of facts in such a way that general laws or conclusions can be drawn from them.

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All parts of the world are habitable! Be it salt lakes, underground lakes hidden under volcanic mountains, hot springs, the depths of the ocean, the upper layers of the air, or even the surface of eternal snow: life is everywhere!

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Those who regard the slave-holder with tender goodwill, but the slave with a hard heart, seem never to have imagined themselves in the position of the latter: what a bleak prospect, without any hope of change. Just think of the possibility that always hovers over you, that your wife and children - whom, due to the arrangement of nature, even the slave calls his own - will be torn from you and sold as bastards to the first buyer. And this is done and defended by people who supposedly love their neighbors as themselves, who believe in God and who pray that his will be done on earth!

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Those who study each part of a beautiful landscape separately will better understand the complete and complex effect of the whole.

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They say that the love of hunting is born with man - the remnant of some instinctive passion. If this is true, I believe that the beauty of living in the open air, where the sky forms the roof and the earth the table, is a manifestation of the same feeling; the uncivilized man reverts to his wild and innate habits.

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The sense of beauty (...) depends on the nature of the mind, regardless of any real quality of the admired object.

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Natural selection works by separating life and death, i.e. through the survival of the fittest and the destruction of the less fit individuals.

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Following a golden rule, every time I came across a new observation or idea that contradicted my previous results, I immediately and accurately wrote it down, because I learned from experience that such data and ideas are much more likely to be forgotten than favorable ones.

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Even if it is difficult for us, we must admire the cruel, instinctive hatred of the queen bee, with which she destroys the little queen bees, her own daughters, when they are born, or she herself perishes in the struggle. There is no doubt that this is beneficial to the community. Maternal love or maternal hatred, although fortunately the latter is rarer - from the point of view of the inexorable principle of natural selection, it goes on and on.

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I also see no reason why the views expressed in my work should offend anyone's religious feelings. How ephemeral this impression is, it is enough to remind that the greatest discovery ever made, namely the discovery of the law of gravitational attraction, was attacked by Leibniz as "undermining natural religion, and consequently also revealed religion".

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All living things seek to reproduce in geometrical progression, and at some stage of their life or of any given year, generation after generation, or at longer intervals, each of them must struggle for existence and perish in large numbers. If we think about this struggle, we can console ourselves with the belief that war in nature is not continuous, it is not accompanied by fear, death is usually instantaneous, and that the vigorous, the healthy and the skillful survive and reproduce.

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The power of misinterpretation is great, but the history of science shows that, fortunately, it does not last.

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Man, with all his noble qualities, still bears the indelible stamp of his low birth in the prison of his body.

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A scientist should not have desires and emotions! Have a heart of stone!

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It will not be the strongest species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one that can change the fastest.

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In the moment of action, a man is undoubtedly inclined to follow the stronger impulse, and, although on occasion it prompts him to the noblest actions, he is generally driven to gratify his own desires at the expense of others.

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The survival instinct only becomes felt in case of danger; many a coward thought himself brave until he came face to face with his enemy.

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Conscience looks back into the past and guides the future.

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Some instincts are shared by humans and higher animals, especially primates. They all have the same senses, instinctive intuitions, similar passions, emotions and temperaments, and even more complicated temperaments, such as jealousy, suspicion, rivalry, gratitude and generosity; they are all deceitful and vengeful; they are often susceptible to the ridiculous and have a sense of humor, wonder, curiosity, and the same faculties of imitation, attention, consideration, choice, memory, imagination, association, and thought, though in very different degrees. From an intellectual point of view, even among the individuals of the same species, all degrees can be found from complete feeble-mindedness to excellence. All are prone to insanity, although animals are much less prone than humans.

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I recommend to all nature divers, (...) to seize the opportunity and go on a land trip or, if it is not possible otherwise, a long sea trip. You can be sure that the difficulties or dangers that await you are never as serious as you imagine. From a moral point of view, his profit will be that the trip will teach him a certain good-natured patience, free him from selfishness, get used to independent action and learn to draw the best lesson for himself from everything that happens. In a word: he acquires the characteristic features of most sailors. Of course, traveling may make him distrustful; but at the same time, he realizes how many good-hearted people there are, with whom he has never had anything to do with before and perhaps never will again, and who nevertheless readily rush to his aid.