Top 200 Charles Darwin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions.”

— Charles Darwin

52. “To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.”

— Charles Darwin

53. “Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.”

— Charles Darwin

54. “We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.”

— Charles Darwin

55. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.”

— Charles Darwin

56. “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.””

— Charles Darwin

57. “I was a young man with uninformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything; and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.”

— Charles Darwin

58. “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.”

— Charles Darwin

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

— Charles Darwin

60. “In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.”

— Charles Darwin

61. “In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.”

— Charles Darwin

62. “The most energetic workers I have encountered in my world travels are the vegetarian miners of Chile.”

— Charles Darwin

63. “A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die – which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.”

— Charles Darwin

64. “It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter.”

— Charles Darwin

65. “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.”

— Charles Darwin

66. “Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.”

— Charles Darwin

67. “An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.”

— Charles Darwin

68. “We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.”

— Charles Darwin

69. “I am not the least afraid to die.”

— Charles Darwin

70. “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.”

— Charles Darwin

71. “The question of whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed.”

— Charles Darwin

72. “You will be astonished to find how the whole mental disposition of your children changes with advancing years. A young child and the same when nearly grown, sometimes differ almost as much as do a caterpillar and butterfly.”

— Charles Darwin

73. “I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.”

— Charles Darwin

74. “Hence, a traveller should be a botanist, for in all views plants form the chief embellishment.”

— Charles Darwin

75. “The noble science of Geology loses glory from the extreme imperfection of the record. The crust of the earth with its embedded remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum, but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals.”

— Charles Darwin

76. “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.”

— Charles Darwin

77. “A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.”

— Charles Darwin

78. “With mammals the male appears to win the female much more through the law of battle than through the display of his charms.”

— Charles Darwin

79. “It is impossible to concieve of this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity.”

— Charles Darwin

80. “A republic cannot succeed, till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.”

— Charles Darwin

81. “I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men, for instance Huxley.”

— Charles Darwin

82. “On your life, underestimating the proclivities of finches is likely to lead to great internal hemorrhaging.”

— Charles Darwin

83. “To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.”

— Charles Darwin

84. “Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us – of their imagined approbation or disapprobation.”

— Charles Darwin

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

— Charles Darwin

86. “Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.”

— Charles Darwin

87. “I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very like conscience.”

— Charles Darwin

88. “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.”

— Charles Darwin

89. “Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care.”

— Charles Darwin

90. “We have happy days, remember good dinners.”

— Charles Darwin

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

— Charles Darwin

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

— Charles Darwin

93. “Man selects only for his own good: Nature only for that of the being which she tends.”

— Charles Darwin

94. “Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult – at least I have found it so – than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.”

— Charles Darwin

95. “As the sense of smell is so intimately connected with that of taste, it is not surprising that an excessively bad odour should excite wretching or vomitting in some persons.”

— Charles Darwin

96. “Daily it is forced home on the mind of the biologist that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of this earth.”

— Charles Darwin

97. “Life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pains about my style of writing.”

— Charles Darwin

98. “I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.”

— Charles Darwin

99. “A novel according to my taste, does not come into the moderately good class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love – and if a pretty woman, all the better.”

— Charles Darwin

100. “Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.”

— Charles Darwin