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Charles Darwin Quotes and Sayings
Quotes by Charles Darwin

The very essence of instinct is that
it's followed independently of reason.
- Charles Darwin

Related topics: Life Human-Nature Psychology Human

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

A man who dares to waste one hour of time
has not discovered the value of life.
- Charles Darwin

It is not the strongest of the species that survive,
nor the most intelligent,
but the one most responsive to change.
- Charles Darwin

On the ordinary view of each species
having been independently created,
we gain no scientific explanation.
- Charles Darwin

I have called this principle,
by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved,
by the term of Natural Selection.
- Charles Darwin

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.
- Charles Darwin

What a book a devil's chaplain might write
on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low,
and horribly cruel work of nature!
- Charles Darwin

Animals, whom we have made our slaves,
we do not like to consider our equal.
- Charles Darwin

To kill an error is as good a service as,
and sometimes even better than,
the establishing of a new truth or fact.
- Charles Darwin

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

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

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

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me,
that man with all his noble qualities...
still bears in his bodily frame
the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
- Charles Darwin

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped,
probably arboreal in its habits.
- Charles Darwin

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.
- Charles Darwin

A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.
- Charles Darwin

Man tends to increase at a greater rate
than his means of subsistence.
- Charles Darwin

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for
grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
- Charles Darwin

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare,
and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
- Charles Darwin

I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts
and grinding out conclusions.
- Charles Darwin

The universe we observe has precisely
the properties we should expect
if there is, at bottom, no design,
no purpose, no evil, no good,
nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
- Charles Darwin

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

I love fools' experiments.
I am always making them.
- Charles Darwin

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science,
for they often endure long; but false views,
if supported by some evidence, do little harm,
for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.
- Charles Darwin

The highest possible stage in moral culture
is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
- Charles Darwin

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.
- 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

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting
on his past actions and their motives -
of approving of some and disapproving of others.
- 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

Essence Quotes and Sayings

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live
that his happiness shall depend
as little as possible on external things.
- Epictetus

The essence of being human is that one
does not seek perfection.
- George Orwell

The essence of life is not in
the great victories and grand failures,
but in the simple joys.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The essence of all religions is one.
Only their approaches are different.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures
is not to hate them,
but to be indifferent to them:
that's the essence of inhumanity.
- George Bernard Shaw

The essence of all religions is One.
Surrender is the main duty of everyone.
Surrender means the feeling of oneness,
I and God are One. Why?
The reason is that the One
who is present in you is present in me.
- Sri Sathya Sai Baba

Great relationships begin with two people who are each
self confident and who come to each other with the openness
to see and accept the other as a unique and wonderful person.
If there is true love and an alignment of fundamental values,
choose to join your life with your new partner
and vow never to criticize their nature -
the essence that makes them uniquely themselves.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

God is all there is - God includes everything,
all possibility and all action,
for Spirit is the invisible essence and substance of all form.
- Ernest Holmes

The acceptance of oneself is
the essence of the whole moral problem
and the epitome of a whole outlook on life.
- Carl Jung

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.
- R. Buckminster Fuller

Know that the essence of life is not
in the great victories and grand failures,
but in the simple joys.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

May your mind whirl joyful cartwheels of creativity.
May your heart sing sweet lullabies of timelessness.
May your essence be the nectar of the open blossom of your joy.
May your spirit soar throughout the vast cathedral of your being.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Know that the true essence of the Golden Rule
is always being compassionate, kind,
generous, and being in service to others.
Compelling others to behave as you wish
them to behave in the name of the
Golden Rule is a corruption of a sacred principle.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Philosophy Quotes and Sayings

I never considered a difference of opinion
in politics, in religion, in philosophy,
as cause for withdrawing from a friend.
- Thomas Jefferson

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid
as getting to know how enormously much
he is capable of doing and becoming.
- Soren Kierkegaard

The minority is always stronger than the majority,
because the minority is generally formed by those
who really have an opinion.
- Soren Kierkegaard

The highest and most beautiful things in life
are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but,
if one will, are to be lived.
- Soren Kierkegaard

People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand
my complaint about them not understanding me.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Be that self which one truly is.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Pleasure disappoints, possibility never
- Soren Kierkegaard

Life can only be understood backwards;
but it must be lived forwards.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste
that they hurry past it.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
- Soren Kierkegaard

At the bottom of enmity between strangers lies indifference.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
- Soren Kierkegaard

The function of prayer is not to influence God,
but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
- Soren Kierkegaard

If I am capable of grasping God objectively,
I do not believe, but precisely because
I cannot do this I must believe.
- Soren Kierkegaard

People hardly ever make use of the freedom which they have,
for example, freedom of thought;
instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.
- Soren Kierkegaard

It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks,
that we concentrate only
on what is most significant and important.
- Soren Kierkegaard

The tyrant dies and his rule is over,
the martyr dies and his rule begins
- Soren Kierkegaard

A man who as a physical being
is always turned toward the outside,
thinking that his happiness lies outside him,
finally turns inward and
discovers that the source is within him.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Face the facts of being what you are,
for that is what changes what you are.
- Soren Kierkegaard

The self-assured believer is a greater sinner
in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever
- Soren Kierkegaard

Far from idleness being the root of all evil,
it is rather the only true good.
- Soren Kierkegaard

The truth is a snare:
you cannot have it, without being caught.
You cannot have the truth
in such a way that you catch it,
but only in such a way that it catches you.
- Soren Kierkegaard

Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.
- Soren Kierkegaard

The more a man can forget, the greater the number
of metamorphoses which his life can undergo,
the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.
- Soren Kierkegaard

I've developed a new philosophy...
I only dread one day at a time.
- the character Charlie Brown in Charles M. Schulz' Peanuts comic

Prayer doesn't change God, but changes him who prays
- Soren Kierkegaard

Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.
- Soren Kierkegaard

It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.
- Soren Kierkegaard

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Today is Your Day to Dance Lightly with Life.  It Really Is.
      - Jonathan Lockwood Huie