509 Quotes by Charles Darwin

From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed. ... To group all facts under some general laws.

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'”

Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a great deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.

Till facts be grouped and called there can be no prediction. The only advantage of discovering laws is to foretell what will happen and to see the bearing of scattered facts.

Extinction has only separated groups: it has by no means made them; for if every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear, though it would be quite impossible to give definitions by which each group could be distinguished from other groups, as all would blend together by steps as fine as those between the finest existing varieties, nevertheless a natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would be possible.

From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows.

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

About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorise; and I well remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.