Charles Darwin

“I hope that I may die before my mind fails to a sensible extent.”

“Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble, and I believe truer, to consider him created from animals.”

“I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.”

“How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!”

“What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature!”

“Though the theory is worthless without the well-observed facts, the facts are useless without the frame of the theory to receive them.”

“As far as I can judge, I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men. I have steadily endeavoured to keep my mind free, so as to give up any hypothesis, however much beloved (and I cannot resist forming one on every subject), as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it.”

“Science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.”

“I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.”

“I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.”

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

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”