“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.”

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

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

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.

Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care.

One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

We are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps

What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame; the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly.

The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man’s ignorance.

Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions.

Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

Man’s great power of thinking, remembering, and communicating are responsible for the evolution of civilization.

If evolution was worth its salt, it should’ve evolved something better than ‘survival of the fittest.’ I think a better idea would be ‘survival of the wittiest.’ At least, that way, creatures that didn’t survive could’ve died laughing.

There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.

But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.

You got to want to evolve. It’s something you can practice on but it just came to me. I wasn’t really sitting there like, ‘What can I do to get better?’ It just came to me, talking to my people and my crew. They just tell me what my strongest and weakest points are at.

Forced idleness evolves into beauty.

I don’t think Indian e-commerce companies have an evolved business model.