Top 200 Charles Darwin Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.”

— Charles Darwin

102. “It is like confessing to a murder.”

— Charles Darwin

103. “If I had not been so great an invalid, I should not have done so much as I have accomplished.”

— Charles Darwin

104. “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.”

— Charles Darwin

105. “I conclude that the musical notes and rhythms were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex.”

— Charles Darwin

106. “I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects.”

— Charles Darwin

107. “We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.”

— Charles Darwin

108. “Man himself cannot express love and humility by external signs, so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous body, and wagging tail, he meets his beloved master.”

— Charles Darwin

109. “What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern?”

— Charles Darwin

110. “It is easy to specify the individual objects of admiration in these grand scenes; but it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, astonishment, and devotion, which fill and elevate the mind.”

— Charles Darwin

111. “Sympathy for the lowest animals is one of the noblest virtues with which man is endowed.”

— Charles Darwin

112. “Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions.”

— Charles Darwin

113. “I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.”

— Charles Darwin

114. “Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.”

— Charles Darwin

115. “I long to set foot where no man has trod before.”

— Charles Darwin

116. “When the sexes differ in beauty, in the power of singing, or in producing what I have called instrumental music, it is almost invariably the male which excels the female.”

— Charles Darwin

117. “Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.”

— Charles Darwin

118. “The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man’s ignorance.”

— Charles Darwin

119. “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.”

— Charles Darwin

120. “Progress has been much more general than retrogression.”

— Charles Darwin

121. “Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion but it would take an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal can blush.”

— Charles Darwin

122. “It is a truly wonderful fact – the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity – that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group.”

— Charles Darwin

123. “So great is the economy of Nature, that most flowers which are fertilized by crepuscular or nocturnal insects emit their odor chiefly or exculsively in the evening.”

— Charles Darwin

124. “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.”

— Charles Darwin

125. “The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.”

— Charles Darwin

126. “I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics, for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.”

— Charles Darwin

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

— Charles Darwin

128. “Man, wonderful man, must collapse, into nature’s cauldron, he is no deity, he is no exception.”

— Charles Darwin

129. “Sympathy will have been increased through natural selection.”

— Charles Darwin

130. “Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions!! The devil under form of Baboon is our grandfather.”

— Charles Darwin

131. “From the first dawn of life, all organic beings are found to resemble each other in descending degrees, so that they can be classed in groups under groups. This classification is evidently not arbitrary like the grouping of stars in constellations.”

— Charles Darwin

132. “Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence.”

— Charles Darwin

133. “Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee and spirituous liqueurs.”

— Charles Darwin

134. “The age-old and noble thought of ‘I will lay down my life to save another,’ is nothing more than cowardice.”

— Charles Darwin

135. “We are optimists, until we are not.”

— Charles Darwin

136. “I feel like an old warhorse at the sound of a trumpet when I read about the capturing of rare beetles.”

— Charles Darwin

137. “I am a firm believer, that without speculation there is no good and original observation.”

— Charles Darwin

138. “It strikes me that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen would know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.”

— Charles Darwin

139. “I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone.”

— Charles Darwin

140. “Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps.”

— Charles Darwin

141. “He who understands baboons would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”

— Charles Darwin

142. “One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.”

— Charles Darwin

143. “It is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing, though so necessary beforehand and so useful afterwards.”

— Charles Darwin

144. “We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.”

— Charles Darwin

145. “An agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.”

— Charles Darwin

146. “If Mozart, instead of playing the pianoforte at three years old with wonderfully little practice, had played a tune with no practice at all, he might truly have been said to have done so instinctively.”

— Charles Darwin

147. “Animals manifestly enjoy excitement, and suffer from annul and may exhibit curiosity.”

— Charles Darwin

148. “I suppose you are two fathoms deep in mathematics, and if you are, then God help you. For so am I, only with this difference: I stick fast in the mud at the bottom, and there I shall remain.”

— Charles Darwin

149. “The limit of man s knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination.”

— Charles Darwin

150. “But Geology carries the day: it is like the pleasure of gambling, speculating, on first arriving, what the rocks may be; I often mentally cry out 3 to 1 Tertiary against primitive; but the latter have hitherto won all the bets.”

— Charles Darwin