Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.

[Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.

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

This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.

What wretched doings come from the ardor of fame; the love of truth alone would never make one man attack another bitterly.

I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects.

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.'