Charles Darwin Quotes

One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

An now the silences come in a single lifetime, in a single year... when species die, leaving a silent space in the world song that can never be filled.

There are few things in the world that we don't know. Science has explained everything away.

When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine.

An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand.

People are largely ignorant of the interests of the human species.

Where do we record the passing of wildlife? Who mourns the silent deaths of the small?

For a man’s life would become intolerable, if he knew what was going to happen to him. He would be made aware of future evils, and would suffer their agonies in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings since he would know how they would end. Ignorance is the necessary condition of human happiness, and it has to be admitted that on the whole mankind observes that condition well. We are almost entirely ignorant of ourselves; absolutely of others. In ignorance, we find our bliss; in illusions, our happiness.

Dignity is a mask we wear to hide our ignorance.

We are less than atoms, I say, because the atom obeys the law of its being, whereas we in the insolence of our ignorance deny the law of nature. But I have no argument to address to those who have no faith.

Saint George killed the last dragon, and he was called a hero for it. I've never seen a dragon, and I wish he would have left at least one. Saint Patrick made a name for himself by running the snakes out of Ireland, leaving the place vulnerable to rodent infestation. This business of making saints out of men who exterminate their fellow creatures has got to stop. All I'm saying is, it's starting to get a little lonely up here at the top of the food chain.

Our posterity will wonder about our ignorance of things so plain.

The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance

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

A dogmatic tone is generally inspired by abysmal ignorance. The man who knows nothing thinks he is informing others of something which he has that moment learnt; the man who knows a great deal can scarcely believe that people are ignorant of what he is telling them, and speaks more diffidently.

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

It has been the scheme of the Christian Church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Government to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support.

The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.

One in eight plant species face extinction.

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

Guessing a thing ain't knowing a thing.

The lower animals are our brethren. I include among them the lion and the tiger. We do not know how to live with these carnivorous beasts and poisonous reptiles because of our ignorance.

I had learned to harness ignorance with presumption. I was ready to become an unacknowledged watercolorist.

99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.