“A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.”

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.

I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men.

Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.

I am not the least afraid to die.

From my early youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed. To group all facts under some general laws.

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult, at least I have found it so – than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.

Only the fittest will survive.

The loss of tastes for poetry and music is a loss of happiness.

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

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

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

It is impossible to concieve of this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity.

There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

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.

Though the human heart may have to pause for rest when climbing the heights of affection it rarely stops on the slippery slope of hatred.

The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog.

Dogs are indeed the most social, affectionate, and amiable animals of the whole brute creation.

All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.

Four sweet lips, two pure souls, and one undying affection, – these are love’s pretty ingredients for a kiss.

It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives to it its sweetness; it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it.

We give our best affections to the beautiful, only our second best to the useful.

We need truth to grow in the same way that we need vitamins, affection and love.