509 Quotes by Charles Darwin

It’s not the strongest, but the most adaptable that survive.

It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the plan of creation or unity of design, etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact.

Formerly Milton’s Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton.

I have long discovered that geologists never read each other’s works, and that the only object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness.

It has been a bitter mortification for me to digest the conclusion that the “race is for the strong” and that I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in science.

To my deep mortification my father once said to me, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”

I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men.

Endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Progress has been much more general than retrogression.