What we need are not prohibitory marriage laws, but a reformed society, an educated public opinion which will teach individual duty in these matters.

What birds can have their bills more peculiarly formed than the ibis, the spoonbill, and the heron?

To expect the world to receive a new truth, or even an old truth, without challenging it, is to look for one of those miracles which do not occur.

Truth is born into this world only with pangs and tribulations, and every fresh truth is received unwillingly.

To the mass of mankind religion of some kind is a necessity.

To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception.

I am decidedly of the opinion that in very many instances we can trace such a necessary connexion, especially among birds, and often with more complete success than in the case which I have here attempted to explain.

I spent, as you know, a year and a half in a clergyman's family and heard almost every Tuesday the very best, most earnest and most impressive preacher it has ever been my fortune to meet with, but it produced no effect whatever on my mind.

It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.

On the spiritual theory, man consists essentially of a spiritual nature or mind intimately associated with a spiritual body or soul, both of which are developed in and by means of a material organism.

In all works on Natural History, we constantly find details of the marvellous adaptation of animals to their food, their habits, and the localities in which they are found.

I hold with Henry George, that at the back of every great social evil will be found a great political wrong.

I am thankful I can see much to admire in all religions.

Civilisation has ever accompanied emigration and conquest - the conflict of opinion, of religion, or of race.

There is, I conceive, no contradiction in believing that mind is at once the cause of matter and of the development of individualised human minds through the agency of matter.

What we need are not prohibitory marriage laws, but a reformed society, an educated public opinion which will teach individual duty in these matters.

But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life.

As well might it be said that, because we are ignorant of the laws by which metals are produced and trees developed, we cannot know anything of the origin of steamships and railways.

The foregoing considerations lead us to the very important conclusion, that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force; that matter, as popularly understood, does not exist, and is, in fact, philosophically inconceivable.

In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.

I have since wandered among men of many races and many religions.

If this is not done, future ages will certainly look back upon us as a people so immersed in the pursuit of wealth as to be blind to higher considerations.

Modification of form is admitted to be a matter of time.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.

Last year, the Assembly of the League, as a result of the initiative taken by the Scandinavian nations, further limited and clarified all the provisions of the clause prescribing the duty of states to participate in sanctions.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Let everyone regulate his conduct... by the golden rule of doing to others as in similar circumstances we would have them do to us, and the path of duty will be clear before him.

Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

Marriage is the miracle that transforms a kiss from a pleasure into a duty.

To vote is like the payment of a debt, a duty never to be neglected, if its performance is possible.

Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

Every Christian will allow that sin is an evil, and that it is our duty not to commit sin.

Poland is an ally of the United States of America. It was our duty to show that we are a reliable, loyal, and predictable ally. America needed our help, and we had to give it.

Whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Churchill knew the importance of peace, and he also knew the price of it. Churchill finally got his voice, of course. He stressed strategy, but it was his voice that armed England at last with the old-fashioned moral concepts of honor and duty, justice and mercy.

As a medical doctor, it is my duty to evaluate the situation with as much data as I can gather and as much expertise as I have and as much experience as I have to determine whether or not the wish of the patient is medically justified.

Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.

Man is a living duty, a depository of powers that he must not leave in a brute state. Man is a wing.

Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there.

Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.

Spreading the news is your duty as a Christian, and there are many ways to do this.

The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.

Courage that grows from constitution often forsakes a man when he has occasion for it; courage which arises from a sense of duty acts; in a uniform manner.

Duty is not collective; it is personal.

It is a high patriotic duty that we support and sustain the men who have been placed in position of difficulty, burden, responsibility, and even danger as the result of our suffrages.