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.

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

At no time am I a quick thinker or writer: whatever I have done in science has solely been by long pondering, patience and industry.

Thomson's views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.

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.

Music was known and understood before words were spoken.

Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.