Top 200 Charles Darwin Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “We may confidently come to the conclusion, that the forces which slowly and by little starts uplift continents, and that those which at successive periods pour forth volcanic matter from open orifices, are identical.”

— Charles Darwin

152. “It struck me that favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones tend to be destroyed.”

— Charles Darwin

153. “On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.”

— Charles Darwin

154. “Man is developed from an ovule, about 125th of an inch in diameter, which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals.”

— Charles Darwin

155. “I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things; and a most perplexing problem it is. Many men who are very clever – much cleverer than the discoverers – never originate anything.”

— Charles Darwin

156. “Delight itself, however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist.”

— Charles Darwin

157. “So in regard to mental qualities, their transmission is manifest in our dogs, horses and other domestic animals. Besides special tastes and habits, general intelligence, courage, bad and good tempers. etc., are certainly transmitted.”

— Charles Darwin

158. “May we not suspect that the vague but very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times?”

— Charles Darwin

159. “The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers.”

— Charles Darwin

160. “I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected facts.”

— Charles Darwin

161. “If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.”

— Charles Darwin

162. “Although I am fully convinced of the truth of Evolution, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists. But I look with confidence to the future naturalists, who will be able to view both sides with impartiality.”

— Charles Darwin

163. “When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.”

— Charles Darwin

164. “A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives – of approving of some and disapproving of others.”

— Charles Darwin

165. “It may be doubted that there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly organized creatures.”

— Charles Darwin

166. “I shall always feel respect for every one who has written a book, let it be what it may, for I had no idea of the trouble which trying to write common English could cost one – And alas there yet remains the worst part of all correcting the press.”

— Charles Darwin

167. “Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.”

— Charles Darwin

168. “I think it can be shown that there is such an unerring power at work in Natural Selection, which selects exclusively for the good of each organic being.”

— Charles Darwin

169. “It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant.”

— Charles Darwin

170. “The instruction at Edinburgh was altogether by lectures, and these were intolerably dull, with the exception of those on chemistry.”

— Charles Darwin

171. “A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.”

— Charles Darwin

172. “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.”

— Charles Darwin

173. “What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame; the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly.”

— Charles Darwin

174. “Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves.”

— Charles Darwin

175. “A cell is a complex structure, with its investing membrane, nucleus, and nucleolus.”

— Charles Darwin

176. “Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.”

— Charles Darwin

177. “The tree of life should perhaps be called the coral of life, base of branches dead; so that passages cannot be seen-this again offers contradiction to constant succession of germs in progress.”

— Charles Darwin

178. “The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.”

— Charles Darwin

179. “What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!”

— Charles Darwin

180. “It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.”

— Charles Darwin

181. “Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.”

— Charles Darwin

182. “As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.”

— Charles Darwin

183. “How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.”

— Charles Darwin

184. “Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.”

— Charles Darwin

185. “Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms.”

— Charles Darwin

186. “The season of love is that of battle. The roots of these fights run deep.”

— Charles Darwin

187. “I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.”

— Charles Darwin

188. “Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.”

— Charles Darwin

189. “It is scarcely possible to doubt that the love of man has become instinctive in the dog.”

— Charles Darwin

190. “Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of facts will certainly reject my theory.”

— Charles Darwin

191. “The man that created the theory of evolution by natural selection was thrown out by his Dad because he wanted him to be a doctor. GAWD, parents haven’t changed much.”

— Charles Darwin

192. “Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but at last was complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.”

— Charles Darwin

193. “The man who walks with Henslow.”

— Charles Darwin

194. “The young blush much more freely than the old but not during infancy, which is remarkable, as we know that infants at a very early age redden from passion.”

— Charles Darwin

195. “Whoever is led to believe that species are mutable will do good service by conscientiously expressing his conviction; for only thus can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.”

— Charles Darwin

196. “I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.”

— Charles Darwin

197. “Thomson’s views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.”

— Charles Darwin

198. “With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.”

— Charles Darwin

199. “When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly forsee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.”

— Charles Darwin

200. “Physiological experiment on animals is justifiable for real investigation, but not for mere damnable and detestable curiosity.”

— Charles Darwin