Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps.

The moral faculties are generally and justly esteemed as of higher value than the intellectual powers.

Worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than humans would at first suppose.

It is not the biggest, the brightest or the best that will survive, but those who adapt the quickest.

But Geology carries the day: it is like the pleasure of gambling, speculating, on first arriving, what the rocks may be; I often mentally cry out 3 to 1 Tertiary against primitive; but the latter have hitherto won all the bets.

We are optimists, until we are not.

When the sexes differ in beauty, in the power of singing, or in producing what I have called instrumental music, it is almost invariably the male which excels the female.