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

Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval [tropical] forests, ... temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature. No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.

The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.

If every one were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty.

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

Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves.

On the theory of natural selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, “Natura non facit saltum.” This canon, if we look only to the present inhabitants of the world, is not strictly correct, but if we include all those of past times, it must by my theory be strictly true.