Quotes to inspire and reflect

Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

The universe we obey has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. . . . DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.

They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence . . . they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.

About 60 years ago, I said to my father, “Old Mr. Senex is showing his age; he sometimes talks quite stupidly.” My father replied, “That isn’t age. He’s always been stupid. He is just losing his ability to conceal it.”

Man with all his noble qualities . . . with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system . . . still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures.

We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.

For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs—as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often long endure; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, as everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.

The Simiadae then branched off into two great stems, the New World and Old World monkeys; and from the latter at a remote period, Man, the wonder and the glory of the universe, proceeded.

I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent design or indeed of design of any kind, in the details.

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.

I never saw a more striking coincidence. If [Alfred Russel] Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters.

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving.

Origin of man now proved.—Metaphysics must flourish.—He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle .

Onorate l’altissimo poeta .

If I thought my answer were to one who would ever return to the world, this flame should stay without another movement; but since none ever returned alive from this depth, if what I hear is true, I answer thee without fear of infamy.

[ Inscription at entrance to Hell :] LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA VOI CH’ ENTRATE .

In that part of the book of my memory before which is little that can be read, there is a rubric, saying, “Incipit Vita Nova [The New Life Begins].”

The various reasons which we have enumerated lead us to believe that the new radio-active substance contains a new element to which we propose to give the name of radium.

A large nose is the mark of a witty, courteous, affable, generous, and liberal man.

tomorrow is our permanent address.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

(dreaming,

unless statistics lie he was

. . . the Cambridge ladies do not care, above Cambridge if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless, the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy.

these heroic happy dead who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter they did not stop to think they died instead then shall the voice of liberty be mute? He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water.

they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead.

in Just-

Buffalo Bill’s defunct.

how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death.

I became one of the stately homos of England. The Naked Civil Servant ch. 24 (1968)

[ Response to being asked by a U.S. immigration officer whether he was a “practising homosexual” :] Practising? Certainly not. I’m perfect.

I will go to the garden.

shall we &

A man said to the universe:

It is hard going to the door cut so small in the wall where the vision which echoes loneliness brings a scent of wild flowers in the wood.

The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.

At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.

In the desert

He who will have equity, or comes hither for equity, must do equity.

In Bengal, to move at all

I have noticed . . . a certain tendency . . . to class me with the generation that was “ineradicably scarred by the war.” . . . I was not in the least scarred by the war. . . . The reasons for my warped disenchantment with life must be sought elsewhere.

[ To T. E. Lawrence when the latter was a corporal in the Royal Air Force :] Dear 338171 (May I call you 338?).

Englishmen detest a siesta.