Thomas Huxley Quotes

Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.

- Thomas Huxley

The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.

- Thomas Huxley

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.

- Thomas Huxley

I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.

- Thomas Huxley

I am content with nothing, restless and ambitious... and I despise myself for the vanity, which formed half the stimulus to my exertions. Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.

- Thomas Huxley

The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

- Thomas Huxley

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

- Thomas Huxley

The child who has been taught to make an accurate elevation, plan, and section of a pint pot has had an admirable training in accuracy of eye and hand.

- Thomas Huxley

The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.

- Thomas Huxley

Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.

- Thomas Huxley

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.

- Thomas Huxley

Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.

- Thomas Huxley

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

- Thomas Huxley

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

- Thomas Huxley

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

- Thomas Huxley

The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.

- Thomas Huxley

The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.

- Thomas Huxley

I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.

- Thomas Huxley

Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.

- Thomas Huxley

The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed.

- Thomas Huxley

In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.

- Thomas Huxley

Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.

- Thomas Huxley

It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.

- Thomas Huxley

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

- Thomas Huxley

The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.

- Thomas Huxley

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

- Thomas Huxley

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

- Thomas Huxley

I take it that the good of mankind means the attainment, by every man, of all the happiness which he can enjoy without diminishing the happiness of his fellow men.

- Thomas Huxley

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

- Thomas Huxley

I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'.

- Thomas Huxley

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.

- Thomas Huxley

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

- Thomas Huxley

The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.

- Thomas Huxley

My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

- Thomas Huxley

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

- Thomas Huxley

It is the customary fate of new truths, to begin as heresies, and to end as superstitions.

- Thomas Huxley

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

- Thomas Huxley

Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.

- Thomas Huxley

Learn what is true in order to do what is right.

- Thomas Huxley

The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.

- Thomas Huxley

The only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false.

- Thomas Huxley

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

- Thomas Huxley

The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth.

- Thomas Huxley

The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.

- Thomas Huxley

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

- Thomas Huxley

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics none in which there is more need of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

- Thomas Huxley

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.

- Thomas Huxley

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

- Thomas Huxley

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.

- Thomas Huxley

No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.

- Thomas Huxley

Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.

- Thomas Huxley

Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.

- Thomas Huxley

Surely there is a time to submit to guidance and a time to take one's own way at all hazards.

- Thomas Huxley

Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.

- Thomas Huxley

If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had better turn to hand work it is an indication on Nature's part that she did not mean him to be a head worker.

- Thomas Huxley

There is but one right, and the possibilities of wrong are infinite.

- Thomas Huxley

Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.

- Thomas Huxley

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

- Thomas Huxley

I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and would up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.

- Thomas Huxley

Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.

- Thomas Huxley

No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

- Thomas Huxley

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

- Thomas Huxley

It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.

- Thomas Huxley

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.

- Thomas Huxley

There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.

- Thomas Huxley

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.

- Thomas Huxley

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

- Thomas Huxley

Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

- Thomas Huxley

Misery is a match that never goes out.

- Thomas Huxley

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

- Thomas Huxley

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.

- Thomas Huxley

Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!

- Thomas Huxley