“Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music.”

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.

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

My dream is to put together a performance of the evolution of black music with Cirque du Soleil . I would also like to do street opera and children’s books. But even as I work toward these things, I want to simplify my life.

I finished a big book the other day. 421 pages. That’s a lot of coloring when you think about it.

Good books are as friends, willing to give to us if we are willing to make a little effort.

God has a purpose behind every problem. He uses circumstances to develop our character. In fact, he depends more on circumstances to make us like Jesus than he depends on our reading the Bible.

The Koran shows every sign of being thrown together by human beings, as do all the other holy books.

I don’t want people to think that they can attain realization simply by listening to others or by reading books. They must practice what they read and hear.

The covers of this book are too far apart.

It is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience.