With mammals the male appears to win the female much more through the law of battle than through the display of his charms.

If I had life to live over again, I would give my life to poetry, to music, to literature, and to art to make life richer and happier. In my youth I steeled myself against them and thought them so much waste.

Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.

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

I long to set foot where no man has trod before.

... not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.

During my second year at Edinburgh [1826-27] I attended Jameson's lectures on Geology and Zoology, but they were incredible dull. The sole effect they produced on me was the determination never as long as I lived to read a book on Geology.