T. H. Huxley Quotes
Friendship involves many things but, above all the power of going outside oneself and appreciating what is noble and loving in another.
For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim's time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.
Only man is not content to leave things as they are but must always be changing them, and when he has done so, is seldom satisfied with the result.
If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were.
If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.
In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
To persons uninstructed in natural history, their country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.
In a few years, no doubt, marriage licences will be sold like dog licences, good for 12 months.
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.
Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.
...two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.
Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.
Intellectuals ... regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations.
You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.
No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.
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.
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
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 always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.
Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.
To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.
The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang it goes
...we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.
Somewhere in the rain, there will always be an abandoned dog that prevents you from being happy.
One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe, when in fact one's just a slight interruption in the ongoing march of entropy.
The only people, scientific or other, who never make mistakes are those who do nothing.
Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.