If every one were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty.
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
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.
I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.
Much love much trial, but what an utter desert is life without love.
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.
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.
The normal food of man is vegetable.
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.
There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.
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.
He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation ... Man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.
Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.
The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith?
As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.
We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.
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.
Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms.
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter.
Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.
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