 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. |
| I love fools' experiments. I am always making them. |
| I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars. |
| I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. |
| In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. |
| A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life. |
| To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact. |
| Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits. |
| It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. |
| We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act. |
| At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world. |
| On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation. |
| Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. |
| A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone. |
| Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence. |
| How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children. |
| A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth. |
| The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts. |
| What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature! |
| The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason. |
