Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
Charles DarwinRead
There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.
Interpretation
Humans and animals share similar emotional experiences.
This quote by Charles Darwin emphasizes the continuity between humans and animals regarding emotional capacities. Darwin suggests that the ability to experience pleasure and pain is not exclusive to humans, highlighting a fundamental connection between species that calls for empathy and moral consideration towards all living beings.
In practice
In a discussion about animal rights during a conference.
Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
I am quite conscious that my speculations run beyond the bounds of true science....It is a mere rag of an hypothesis with as many flaw[s] & holes as sound parts.
We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
we are always slow in admitting any great change of which we do not see the intermediate steps
This life was not intended to be the place of our perfection, but the preparation for it.
Cheap medical care is one of the most expensive things there is. So long as politicians can create the illusion of something for nothing, that gets them votes, which is what it is all about, as far as they are concerned.
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Although its light is wide and great, the Moon is reflected in a puddle one inch wide. The whole Moon and the entire sky is reflected in one dew drop on the grass.
And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?
But we had with us, to keep and to care for, more than five hundred bruised bodies of men- men made in the image of God, marred by the hand of man and must we say in the name of God? And where is the reckoning for such things? And who is answerable? One might almost shrink from the sound of his own voice, which had launched into the palpitating air words of order- do we call it? - fraught with such ruin. Was it God's command we heard or His forgiveness we must forever implore?
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