I love fools' experiments. 

I am always making them.

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

If the misery of the poor be caused 

not by the laws of nature, 

but by our institutions, 

great is our sin.

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.

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.

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.

And my error has been a good lesson to me

 never to trust in science 

to the principle of exclusion.

This preservation of favourable variations 

and the rejection of injurious variations, 

I call Natural Selection. 

Variations neither useful nor injurious 

would not be affected by natural selection, 

and would be left a fluctuating element…

I should premise 

that I use the term Struggle for Existence 

in a large and metaphorical sense, 

including dependence of one being on another, 

and including (which is more important) 

not only the life of the individual, 

but success in leaving progeny.

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.

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

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, 

we do not like to consider our equal.

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.

To kill an error is as good a service as, 

and sometimes even better than, 

the establishing of a new truth or fact.

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, 

clothed with many plants of many kinds, 

with birds singing on the bushes, 

with various insects flitting about, 

and with worms crawling through the damp earth, 

and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, 

so different from each other, 

and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, 

have all been produced by laws acting around us.

Doing what little one can 

to increase the general stock of knowledge 

is as respectable an object of life, 

as one can in any likelihood pursue.

There is grandeur in this view of life.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, 

nor the most intelligent that survives. 

It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

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.