The instruction at Edinburgh was altogether by lectures, and these were intolerably dull, with the exception of those on chemistry.

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.

It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.

Every one must be struck with astonishment, when he first beholds one of these vast rings of coral-rock, often many leagues in diameter, here and there surmounted by a low verdant island with dazzling white shores, bathed on the outside by the foaming breakers of the ocean, and on the inside surrounding a calm expanse of water, which, from reflection, is of a bright but pale green color.

Not one change of species into another is on record ... we cannot prove that a single species has been changed.

I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects.

The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man's ignorance.