T. H. Huxley Quotes

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination.

He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations of misery.

The worth of a gift lies as much in the way it is offered as in its intrinsic value.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.

For I am you and you are I.

An old codger rampant and still learning.

To his dog every man is Napoleon hence the constant popularity of dogs.

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves to multiply the ways in which they exist to make their life full significant and interesting.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour for their curiosity their intolerance of shams the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

Consistency is contrary to nature contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

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

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Experience is not what happens to you it is what you do with what happens to you.

Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.

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.

Faith may be relied upon to produce sustained action and more rarely sustained contemplation.

A fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

To associate with other like-minded people in small purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction.

Act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done by hesitation.

Every ceiling when reached becomes a floor upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.

Happiness is something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach.

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

Sit down before fact as a little child be prepared to give up every preconceived notion follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads or you shall learn nothing.

At any given moment life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time having a purpose tending in a certain direction.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.

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

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

The great tragedy of Science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

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

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self.

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture.

The course of every intellectual if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough ends in the obvious from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

I have never been able to understand why pigeon-shooting at Hurlingham should be refined and polite while a rat-killing match in Whitechapel is low.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtures are of no avail.

What we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces sleep.

Why should human females become sterile in their forties while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?

Thanks to words we have been able to rise above the brutes and thanks to words we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

Writers write to influence their readers their preachers their auditors but always at bottom to be more themselves.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

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

Science has explained nothing the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.