It is better to read a little and thoroughly than cram a crude undigested mass into my head, though it be great in quantity.

Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science, as strangled snakes beside that of Hercules

That which endures is not one or another association of living forms, but the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of which these are among the transitory expressions.

A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric.

Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature.

I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a physical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.