Thomas Huxley Quotes

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.

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

If individuality has no play, society does not advance; if individuality breaks out of all bounds, society perishes.

What men of science want is only a fair day's wages for more than a fair day's work.

That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.

My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.

I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth.

Matter and force are the two names of the one artist who fashions the living as well as the lifeless.

Of the few innocent pleasures left to men past middle life, the jamming of common sense down the throats of fools is perhaps the keenest.

People may talk about intellectual teaching, but what we principally want is the moral teaching.

Do what you can to do what you ought, and leave hoping and fearing alone.

I have no faith, very little hope, and as much charity as I can afford.

The man who is all morality and intellect, although he may be good and even great, is, after all, only half a man.

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science, as strangled snakes beside that of Hercules

Claiming my right to follow whethersoever science should lead... it is as respectable to be modified monkey as modified dirt.

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.

I wish you would let an old man, who has had his share of fighting, remind you that battles, like hypotheses, are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me

Whatever evil voices may rage, Science, secure among the powers that are eternal, will do her work and be blessed.

My belief is that no human being or society composed of human beings ever did or ever will come to much unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal.

Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?

Life is like walking along a crowded street--there always seem to be fewer obstacles to getting along on the opposite pavement--and yet, if one crosses over, matters are rarely mended.

No mistake is so commonly made by clever people as that of assuming a cause to be bad because the arguments of its supporters are, to a great extent, nonsensical

Cherish [Science], venerate her, follow her methods faithfully ... and the future of this people will be greater than the past.

Every philosophical thinker hails it [The Origin of Species] as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism.

And when you cannot prove that people are wrong, but only that they are absurd, the best course is to let them alone.

It is the first duty of a hypothesis to be intelligible.

I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his own share with more courage and submission.

It is better to read a little and thoroughly than cram a crude undigested mass into my head, though it be great in quantity.

There is far too much of the feeding-bottle in education and young people ought to be supplied with good intellectual food and then left to help themselves.

Only a scientific people can survive in a scientific future.

As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention.

Though under-instruction is a bad thing, it is not impossible that over-instruction may be worse.

I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything especially as I am now so much occupied with theology but I don't see my way to your conclusion.

Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.

If a man cannot see a church, it is preposterous to take his opinion about its altar-piece or painted window.

No one can help another very much in these crises of life; but love and sympathy count for something.

I doubt the fact, to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in grand words asking me to believe a thing because I like it.

Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a seance.

The dogma of the infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the popes.

The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind.

There is no sadder sight in the world than to see a beautiful theory killed by a brutal fact.

Surely it must be plain that an ingenious man could speculate without end on both sides, and find analogies for all his dreams. Nor does it help me to tell me that the aspirations of mankind

Nothing great in science has ever been done by men, whatever their powers, in whom the divine afflatus of the truth-seeker was wanting.

My reflection, when I first made myself master of the central idea of the 'Origin', was, 'How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!'