The quotations of

Charles Darwin

English naturalist and biologist

1809–1882

22 quotes, most often on Science, Nature and Life & Death. Part of the Scientists collection.

This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.
On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter IV (1 of 2)In context
- Nature
- Science
It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter IV (1 of 2)In context
- Nature
- Science
As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.
On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter IV (2 of 2)In context
- Life & Death
- Nature
One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter VIIIn context
- Life & Death
- Nature
What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include the same bones, in the same relative positions?
On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter XIIIIn context
- Nature
- Science
When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.
On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter XIVIn context
- Nature
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.
On the Origin of Species (1859), Chapter XIVIn context

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