Charles Darwin citáty

strana 6

„Kdybych měl svůj život žít znovu, udělal bych pravidlo, že bych si alespoň jednou týdně přečetl nějakou poezii a poslouchal nějakou hudbu.“

„Nejvyšším stupněm morální kultury, kterého můžeme dosáhnout, je poznání, že bychom měli ovládat své myšlenky.“

„Nic nezavinilo tolik starostí, tolik chorob a bídy jako požívání alkoholu.“

„Není to ten nejsilnější, kdo přežije, ani ten nejinteligentnější, ale ten, kdo se dokáže nejlépe přizpůsobit.“

„Škola a výchova v ní mi nedaly nic.“

„Matematik je slepý člověk v temné místnosti hledající černou kočku, která tam není.“

„Ani trochu se nebojím zemřít.“

„Největší agrese vzniká mezi nejbližšími živočišnými druhy.“

„Nevědomost vystupuje vždy sebevědoměji než vědění.“

„Zvířata mají stejné pocity jako člověk: radost a bolest, štěstí a neštěstí. Tato hnutí mysli je postihují ve stejné míře jako nás.“

„Ignorance častěji než inteligence plodí sebevědomí.“

„Příroda se snaží lhát vám přímo do očí.“

„Člověk by nedosáhl nikdy panujícího postavení ve světě bez používání rukou, těchto nástrojů, tak podivuhodně poslušných jeho vůle.“

„V přírodě je přežití a úspěch otázkou těch nejschopnějších a nejpřitažlivějších.“

„Pokud nezabráníme tomu, aby se počet bezohledných, ničemných a jinak podřadných členů společnosti zvyšoval rychleji, než lepší třída lidí, národ bude degenerovat.“

„Dokonce i ve smrtelné agónii může pes pohladit svého pána.“

„Sotva se najde někdo tak nerozumný, kdo by pokračoval v chovu právě těch nejhorších jedinců, nejde-li ovšem o lidi.“

„V nepříliš vzdálené budoucnosti, budeme-li ji počítat na staletí, civilizované lidské rasy téměř jistě v celém světě vyhladí a nahradí rasy divošské. Zároveň budou bez pochyby vyhlazeny antropomorfní opice. Mezera se pak zvětší, neboť se bude rozkládat mezi člověkem na úrovni civilizovanější, než jsou běloši, jak můžeme doufat, a nějakými lidoopy na úrovni paviána, a nikoliv jako v současné době mezi černochem či domorodým Australanem a gorilou.“

„Skepticismus je agentem pravdy.“

„Pohlavní výběr závisí na převaze určitých jedinců nad druhými stejného pohlaví, což se týká propagace druhů; zatímco přírodní výběr závisí na vítězství obou pohlaví, v každém věku, za normálních podmínek života.“

„Linné a Cuvier byli mými dvěma bohy…, ale jsou to pouzí školáci vedle starého Aristotela.“

„Na základě principu přírodního výběru s rozbíháním znaků se nezná být nepravděpodobné, že všechny organismy, kteří kdy na této planetě žily, mohou pocházet z jediné prapůvodní formy.“

„Nyní budeme podrobněji diskutovat o boji za existenci.“

“The real affinities of all organic beings are due to inheritance or community of descent.”

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

“There is one living spirit prevalent over this world, (subject to certain contingencies of organic matter & chiefly heat), which assumes a multitude of forms each having acting principle according to subordinate laws.”

“Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system — with all these exalted powers — Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”

“As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shews us how long it is before we look at them as our fellow-creatures. Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is humanity to the lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. It is apparently unfelt by savages, except towards their pets. How little the old Romans knew of it is shewn by their abhorrent gladiatorial exhibitions. The very idea of humanity, as far as I could observe, was new to most of the Gauchos of the Pampas. This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings. As soon as this virtue is honoured and practised by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually through public opinion.”

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibilites.”

“And thus, the forms of life throughout the universe become divided into groups subordinate to groups.”

“As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.”

“I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.”

“What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature!”