origin quotes

We must however acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities†still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

- Charles Robert Darwin
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, ch.21.

If the universe had a beginning, its beginning, by the very condition of the cases, was supernatural; the laws of Nature cannot account for their own origin.

-John Stuart Mill
  Auguste Comte and Positivism.

This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.

-Socrates
Quoted in Plato Theaetetus,150c (translated by F M Cornford).

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

-William Wordsworth
  Preface to Lyrical Ballads (2nd ed.1802; Lyrical Ballads first published1798, preface added1800, enlarged1802).