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

I have long discovered that geologists never read each other's works, and that the only object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness.

I see no good reason why the views given this volume [The Origin of Species] should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, 'as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.'

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

As some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

I cannot see ... evidence of design and beneficence ... There seems to me too much misery in the world.

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