Daily Science Quote #5

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 by the Creator 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 froms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Charles Darwin, in The Origins of Species, p.648-649 in my paperback edition.

This is probably the most quoted passage of the book, mostly because Stephen Jay Gould use to quote it in almost all his essays and books. Though usually we omit the first phrase as it is not as pleasing to the mind as the second phrase.