“We are optimists, until we are not.”

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

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.