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

Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.

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

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.

The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or...

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

If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had...

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree.I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and...

For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who,...

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

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

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

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates; so that we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of...

If about a dozen genera of birds had become extinct or were unknown, who would have ventured to have surmised that birds might have existed which used their wings solely as flappers, like the logger-headed...

In the future I see open fields for more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and...

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.

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...

But I am very poorly today & very stupid & I hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.

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

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view...

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.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on...

The earthquake, however, must be to every one a most impressive event: the earth, considered from our earliest childhood as the type of solidity, has oscillated like a thin crust beneath our feet; and in...

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.

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.

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

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

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their...

The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of...

I fully agree with all that you say on the advantages of H. Spencer’s excellent expression of ‘the survival of the fittest.’ This, however, had not occurred to me till reading your letter. It is,...

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason.

I swear in the name of almighty God, my loyalty to the Fuhrer?” How come that on the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier it says Gott mit uns, God on our side? How come...

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

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

It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.{The phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ was not originated by Charles Darwin, though he discussed Spencer’s ‘excellent expression’ in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace (Jul...

In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light...

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

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

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.

It is difficult to believe in the dreadful but quiet war lurking just below the serene facade of nature.

But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws...

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.

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.

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