Google
|
The quotations are arranged by author name.
Current counts: Authors: 8,146. Quotations: 38,970
Select the first character of the author's last name that you want to look at:
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
|
| Charles Darwin
...all nature is perverse & will not do as I wish it....it is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. 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 life has not discovered the value of life. A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth. A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone.An unbeliever . . . might exclaim 'Surely two distinct Creators must
have been at work'
At no time am I a quick thinker or writer:
whatever I have done in science has solely
been by long pondering, patience and industry.
Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws. 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. I am not the least afraid to die.I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out conclusions. 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. I fully subscribe to the judgement of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animal, the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important....It is the most noble of all the attributes of man.I have called this principle, by which, each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection. I have steadily endeavored 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 the facts are shown to be opposed to it. I love fool's experiments. I am always making them. If the misery of our poor is caused not by the laws of nature, but by our great institutions, great is our sin. Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowlege: 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. -In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection. It has been a bitter moritification for me to digest the conclusion that the 'race is for the strong' and that I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in science. It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine. It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as
the “plan of creation,” “unity of design,” ., and to think that we
give an explanation when we only restate a fact.
Man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is. Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts. Old is when your wife says let's go upstairs and make love, and you answer, honey, I can't do both!The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient. The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts. The most energetic workers I have encountered in my world travels are the vegetarian miners of Chile.The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us, and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic. 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. There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties... The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery. -- Charles DarwinThere seems to be one quality of mind which seems to be of special and extreme advantage in leading him to make discoveries. It was the power of never letting exceptions go unnoticed. To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even
better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
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. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. We civilized men on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process
of elimination.We must, however, acknowledge as it seems to me, that a man with all his noble qualities...still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature! You have powers you never dreamed of. You can do things you never thought you could do. there are no limitations in what you can do except the limitations of your own mind. |
|
Sports Quotations.
Show Business Quotations.
|