Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise; and this into astonishment; and this into stupefied amazement.

The world will not be inherited by the strongest, it will be inherited by those most able to change.

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

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.'

The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.

Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music.

...all nature is perverse & will not do as I wish it.