Charles Darwin

I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us and I for one must be content to remain agnostic.

As for a future life every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague possibilities.

As for future life every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life.

Light may be shed on man and his origins.

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the "Survival of the fittest" is more accurate and is sometimes equally convenient.

I have called this principle by which each slight variation if useful is preserved by the term natural selection.

The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate and is sometimes equally convenient.

I have called the principle by which each slight variation if useful is preserved by the term of Natural Selection.

I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very like a conscience.

Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.

We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.

Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.

Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely.

[Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.

In regard to the amount of difference between the races, we must make some allowance for our nice powers of discrimination gained by a long habit of observing ourselves.