T. H. Huxley Quotes

It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.

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.

Be a little kinder to each other.

My first psychedelic experience with Aldous still directs my life today.

The only people, scientific or other, who never make mistakes are those who do nothing.

A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.

In matters of intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard for any other consideration.

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon.

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.

Rome is the one great spiritual organisation which is able to resist and must, as a matter of life and death, the progress of science and modern civilization

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

Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

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

In fact a favourite problem of Tyndall is-Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.

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

Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say that he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.

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.

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.

Man's Place in Nature.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted.

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.

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

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.

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.

The silent bear no witness against themselves.

Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!

Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education.

When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.

Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.

The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.

Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment

There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.

[I am not] the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

I know very dimly when I start what's going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write.

How difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one's voice!

People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

As late as the seventeenth century, monarchs owned so little furniture that they had to travel from palace to palace with wagon-loads of plate and bedspreads, of carpets and tapestries.

Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.

There are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provocation.