“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.”

Free will is to mind what chance is to matter.

Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us – of their imagined approbation or disapprobation.

We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.

He who remains passive when over-whelmed with grief loses his best chance of recovering his elasticity of mind.

An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.

At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry.

A language, like a species, when extinct, never – reappears.

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

It strikes me that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen would know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.

The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

I ought, or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there.

Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.

Maybe you don’t need to have all the answers, maybe life need not be slower or faster; maybe everything’s evolving in the magic of the unseen, maybe its not about doing but simply being.

Maybe it’s a little more pertinent now since the whole concept of evolution is being questioned by the know-nothing Republican right. Yes, maybe the play’s a little more pertinent now.

It is emphatically the case that life could not arise spontaneously in a primeval soup from its kind.

We evolved the ability to communicate disappointment to teach those around us good manners

Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.

In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them.

The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.

I never leave anything behind. It’s like a history, a chain, a line of life, you just have to move and make new steps, and keep it evolving – but my soul is my soul.