I always make special notes about evidence that contridicts me: supportive evidence I can remember without trying.

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.'

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

Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.

Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.

But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.

The man who walks with Henslow.