T. H. Huxley Quotes

Good is that which makes for unity. Evil is that which makes for separateness.

The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.

Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.

...it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters.

The flower of the present rosily blossomed.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.

War is often described as a law of nature-this is not true: Among the lower animals, war is unknown.

I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am, unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied ... In spite of everything I survive.

I don't care where I'm from, nor where I'm going. From hell to hell.

Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study.

The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable

No Romeo-and-Juliet acts, no nonsense about Love with a large L, none of that popular song claptrap with its skies of blue, dreams come true, heaven with you. Just sensuality for its own sake.

...everything in psychosocial evolution which can properly be called advance, or progress, or improvement, is due directionaly to the increase or improvement of knowledge.

You would think that as you get older you would be more disciplined. As I get older I get less disciplined. I just play around!

The unequal distribution of food is one of the world's most tragic facts. Millions of people die because they have too little to eat, and many die because they have too much.

Habitual caution ties and binds us; it is as if we were dressed always in clothes and shoes that were several sizes too small.

Most furniture is not made for people - they are made for the people who sell them.

We are prone to see what lies behind our eyes, rather than what apprears before them.

The birth of science was the death of superstition.

For every man the world is as fresh as it was at the first day, and as full of untold novelties for him who has the eyes to see them.

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

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.

All knowledge is good. It is impossible to say any fragment of knowledge, however insignificant or remote from one's ordinary pursuits, may not some day be turned to account.

Only times and places, only names and ghosts.

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.

Pain was a fascinating horror

Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity

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

The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.

Can you say something about nothing?

The consistent thinker, the consistently moral man, is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac.

The indispensible is not necessarily the desirable.

Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded "I ate civilization.

The only consistent people are the dead

The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking.

Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers.

If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe.

Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence, ... love is impotent and freedom unattainable.

Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.

I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts.

Man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.

Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

Science in itself is morally neutral; it becomes good or evil according as it is applied.

Well... ...That's what you always forget, isn't it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now.

The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality.

Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.

In spiritual matters, knowledge is dependent upon being; as we are, so we know.

Happiness is never grand.

Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.

An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.