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

— Charles Darwin

I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very like a conscience.

— Charles Darwin

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have resignedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

— Charles Darwin

I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.

— Charles Darwin

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 duck (Micrometers of Eaton); as fins in the water and front legs on the land, like the penguin; as sails, like the ostrich; and functionally for no purpose, like the Artery. Yet the structure of each of these birds is good for it, under the conditions of life to which it is exposed, for each has to live by a struggle; but it is not necessarily the best possible under all possible conditions. It must not be inferred from these remarks that any of the grades of wing-structure here alluded to, which perhaps may all have resulted from disuse, indicate the natural steps by which birds have acquired their perfect power of flight; but they serve, at least, to show what diversified means of transition are possible.

— Charles Darwin

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.

— Charles Darwin

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.

— Charles Darwin

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

— Charles Darwin

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, however, a great objection to this term that it cannot be used as a substantive governing a verb; and that this is a real objection I infer from H. Spencer continually using the words, natural selection.(Letter to A. R. Wallace July 1866)

— Charles Darwin

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

— Charles Darwin