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

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

For the shield may be as important for victory, as the sword or spear.

Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.

The normal food of man is vegetable.

Some call it evolution, And others call it God.

Not one change of species into another is on record, we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age.

The willing horse is always overworked.

We are optimists, until we are not.

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science.

I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations.

I long to set foot where no man has trod before.

We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.

Hence, a traveller should be a botanist, for in all views plants form the chief embellishment.

It is not the biggest, the brightest or the best that will survive, but those who adapt the quickest.