"The Origin of Species" Quotes

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

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

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

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one.

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

Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends.

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.

In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties.

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.