“We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.”

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.

There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.

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!

Heaven’s ebon vault Studded with stars unutterably bright, Through which the moon’s unclouded grandeur rolls, Seems like a canopy which love has spread To curtain her sleeping world.

Tis the witching hour of night, Orbed is the moon and bright. And the stars they glisten, glisten, Seeming with bright eyes to listen- For what listen they?

I want a brighter word than bright.

It’s always tough when you lose – you’ve worked so hard for that moment and it hasn’t gone the way you wanted. But you have to realise there’s always a bright side, you have to pick yourself up and get ready for the next game.

I arise from dreams of thee In the first sweet sleep of night, when the winds are breathing low, and the stars are shining bright.

Your voice is my brightest sunshine through the winter nights. Your voice is the only melody that can rock me to sleep.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens, you have made them bright, precious and fair.

The light from the heart shines ever so brightly like a beautiful flower opening up to the world.