Language is an art, like brewing or baking.... It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt.

He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation ... Man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.

Whenever I have found that I have blundered, or that my work has been imperfected, and when I have been contemptuously criticised, and even when I have been overpraised, so that I have felt mortified, it has been my greatest comfort to say hundreds of times to myself that 'I have worked as hard as I could, and no man can do more than this.'

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely.

I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me.

If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.