Thomas Huxley Quotes

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

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

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

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

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

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

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

Friendship involves many things but, above all the power of going outside oneself and appreciating what is noble and loving in another.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Veracity is the heart of morality.

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

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

[Scientists] have learned to respect nothing but evidence, and to believe that their highest duty lies in submitting to it however it may jar against their inclinations.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Misery is a match that never goes out.

There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.

Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature.

I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything...

The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying.

Unity of plan everywhere lies hidden under the mask: of diversity of structure-the complex is everywhere evolved out of the simple.

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.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.