Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Evolution
The stream of tendency in which all things seek to fulfil the law of their being.
Matthew Arnold. Used also by Emerson.
Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.
Marcus Aurelius—Meditations. Ch. IV. 36.
The rise of every man he loved to trace,
Up to the very pod O!
And, in baboons, our parent race
Was found by old Monboddo.
Their A, B, C, he made them speak,
And learn their qui, quæ, quod, O!
Till Hebrew, Latin, Welsh, and Greek
They knew as well’s Monboddo!
Ballad in Blackwood’s Mag. referring to the originator of the monkey theory, James Burnett (Lord Monboddo).
A fire-mist and a planet,
A crystal and a cell,
A jellyfish and a saurian,
And caves where the cavemen dwell;
Then a sense of law and beauty,
And a face turned from the clod—
Some call it Evolution,
And others call it God.
W. H. Carruth—Each in his Own Tongue.
There was an ape in the days that were earlier,
Centuries passed and his hair became curlier;
Centuries more gave a thumb to his wrist—
Then he was a
Mortimer Collins—The British Birds. St. 5.
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
Charles Darwin—The Origin of Species. Ch. III.
The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.
Charles Darwin—The Origin of Species. Ch. III.
Till o’er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal N
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars and shines, another and the same.
Erasmus Darwin—Botanic Garden. Pt. I. Canto IV. L. 389.
Said the little Eohippus,
“I am going to be a horse,
And on my middle fingernails
To run my earthly course!
***
I’m going to have a flowing tail!
I’m going to have a mane!
I’m going to stand fourteen hands high
On the Psychozoic plain!”
Charlotte P. S. Gilman—Similar cases.
A mighty stream of tendency.
Hazlitt—Essay. Why Distant Objects Please.
Or ever the knightly years were gone
With the old world to the grave,
I was a king in Babylon
And you were a Christian Slave.
W. F. Henley—Echoes. XXXVII.
Children, behold the Chimpanzee;
He sits on the ancestral tree
From which we sprang in ages gone.
I’m glad we sprang: had we held on,
We might, for aught that I can say,
Be horrid Chimpanzees to-day.
Oliver Herford—The Chimpanzee.
We seem to exist in a hazardous time,
Driftin’ along here through space;
Nobody knows just when we begun,
Or how fur we’ve gone in the race.
Ben King—Evolution.
Pouter, tumbler, and fantail are from the same source;
The racer and hack may be traced to one Horse;
So men were developed from monkeys of course,
Which nobody can deny.
Lord Neaves—The Origin of Species.
I was at Euphorbus at the siege of Troy.
Pythagoras.
Equidem æterna constitutione crediderim nexuque causarum latentium et multo ante destinatarum suum quemque ordinem immutabili lege percurrere.
For my own part I am persuaded that everything advances by an unchangeable law through the eternal constitution and association of latent causes, which have been long before predestinated.
Quintus Curtius Rufus—De Rebus Gestis Alexandri Magni. V. 11. 10.
When you were a tadpole and I was a fish, in the Palæozoic time
And side by side in the sluggish tide, we sprawled in the ooze and slime.
Langdon Smith—A Toast to a Lady. (Evolution.) Printed in The Scrap Book, April, 1906.
Civilization is a progress from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity toward a definite, coherent heterogeneity.
Herbert Spencer—First Principles. Ch. XVI. Par. 138; also Ch. XVII. Par. 145. He summaries the same: From a relatively diffused, uniform, and indeterminate arrangement to a relatively concentrated, multiform, and determinate arrangement.
This survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called “natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.”
Herbert Spencer—Principles of Biology. Indirect Equilibration.
Out of the dusk a shadow,
Then a spark;
Out of the cloud a silence,
Then a lark;
Out of the heart a rapture,
Then a pain;
Out of the dead, cold ashes,
Life again.
John Banister Tabb—Evolution.
The Lord let the house of a brute to the soul of a man,
And the man said, “Am I your debtor?”
And the Lord—“Not yet: but make it as clean as you can,
And then I will let you a better.”
Tennyson—By an Evolutionist.
Is there evil but on earth? Or pain in every peopled sphere?
Well, be grateful for the sounding watchword “Evolution” here.
Tennyson—Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. L. 198.
Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good
And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.
Tennyson—Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. L. 200.
When I was a shepherd on the plains of Assyria.
Thoreau.
And hear the mighty stream of tendency
Uttering, for elevation of our thought,
A clear sonorous voice, inaudible
To the vast multitude.
Wordsworth—Excursion. IX. 87.