Thomas Huxley famous quotes

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Graduation #Witty #Educational

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Humility #Dignity #Argument

Science is simply common sense at its best.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Motivational #Common Sense #Common

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of childhood into maturity.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Life #Success #Science

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Beauty #Beautiful #Education

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

#Beautiful #Wise #Children

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

#Leadership #Sports #Freedom

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

#Money #Reading #Book

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Thinking #Authority #Appeals

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Life #Action #Ends

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Truth #Lying #Science

It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Inspiring #Freedom #Men

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Writing #Men #Hands

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.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Life #Eye #Men

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

#Science #Function #Accounts

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Beautiful #Science #Common Sense

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Lying #Snakes #Records

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

#Science #Common Sense #Logic

Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty, and self-respect are the qualities which make a real gentleman or lady.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Real #Self #Generosity

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.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Perseverance #Men #Feet

Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Money #Lying #Doe

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

#Imagination #Limits #Probability

There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Life #Success #Failure

Action is the catalyst that creates accomplishments. It is the path that takes us from uncrafted hopes to realized dreams.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Dream #Accomplishment #Path

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

#Truth #Humility #Fate

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

#Friendship #Appreciate #Noble

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

#Science #Technology #Two Sides

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Life #Success #Education

The question of all questions for humanity, the problem which lies behind all others and is more interesting than any of them, is that of the determination of man's place in nature and his relation to the cosmos.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Determination #Lying #Men

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Faith #Believe #Science

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Science #Sin #Blind

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

#Running #Truth #Honesty

The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Struggle #Heart #Darkness

Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom-box.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Wisdom #Writing #Men

A drop of water is as powerful as a thunder-bolt.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Powerful #Water #Thunder

Give unqualified assent to no propositions but those the truth of which is so clear and distinct that they cannot be doubted. The enunciation of this first great commandment of science consecrated doubt.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Giving #Doubt #Unqualified

Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Dog #Eye #Men

It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Believe #Men #Atheism

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

#Atheism #Made #Guinea

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.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Believe #Doubt #Atheism

Perhaps no order of mammals presents us with so extraordinary a series of gradations as this [step by step, from humans to apes to monkeys to lemurs] - leading us insensibly from the crown and summit of the animal creation down to creatures, from which there is but a step, as it seems, to the lowest, smallest, and least intelligent of the placental Mammalia. It is as if nature herself had forseen the arrogance of man, and with Roman severity had provided that his intellect, by its very triumphs, should call into prominence the slaves, admonishing the conqueror that he is but dust.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Animal #Intelligent #Men

The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitiousfabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance
-- Thomas Huxley

#Religious #Ignorance #Hands

The occurrence of successive forms of life upon our globe is an historical fact, which cannot be disputed; and the relation of these successive forms, as stages of evolution of the same type, is established in various cases.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Historical #Facts #Evolution

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.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Life #Opposites #Matter

Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as with alcohol or with bang and produce, be dint of serious thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Men #Thinking #Ideas

It is given to few to add the store of knowledge, to strike new springs of thought, or to shape new forms of beauty. But so sure as it is that men live not by bread, but by ideas, so sure is it that the future of the world lies in the hands of those who are able to carry the interpretation of nature a step further than their predecessors.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Lying #Spring #Knowledge

There is nothing of permanent value (putting aside a few human affections) nothing that satisfies quiet reflection--except the sense of having worked according to one's capacity and light to make things clear and get rid of cant and shams of all sorts.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Truth #Reflection #Light

To say that an idea is necessary is simply to affirm that we cannot conceive the contrary; and the fact that we cannot conceive the contrary of any belief may be a presumption, but is certainly no proof, of its truth.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Truth #Ideas #May

Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Life Is Too Short #Slaying #Oneself

Elohim was, in logical terminology, the genus of which ghosts, Chemosh, Dagon, Baal, and Jahveh were species. The Israelite believed Jahveh to be immeasurably superior to all other kinds of Elohim. The inscription on the Moabite stone shows that King Mesa held Chemosh to be, as unquestionably, the superior of Jahveh.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Kings #Stones #Elohim

Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Passion #Self #Prejudice

There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Savages #Ghost

Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demonstrations of these philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove that there is no God.
-- Thomas Huxley

#God #Philosophical #Trying

From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because its votaries have been content with mere unverified or unverifiable speculation (and this is the commonest case, because observation and experiment are hard work, while speculation is amusing); or it has been, because the accumulation of details of observation has for a time excluded speculation.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Hard Work #Hands #Details

The clergy are at present divided into three sections: an immense body who are ignorant; a small proportion who know and are silent; and a minute minority who know and speak according to their knowledge.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Ignorant #Minorities #Body

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

#Bible #Self #Dogma

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

#Science #Men #Wages

Some experience of popular lecturing had convinced me that the necessity of making things plain to uninstructed people, was one of the very best means of clearing up the obscure corners in one's own mind.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Mean #Science #People

To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach him something of natural history, and you place in his hands a catalogue of those which are worth turning around. Surely our innocent pleasures are not so abundant in this life, that we can afford to despise this or any other source of them.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Education #Country #Art

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!'
-- Thomas Huxley

#Stupid #Science #Reflection

[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.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Lying #Believe #Science

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

#World

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
-- Thomas Huxley

#Dream #Science #Men

It does not matter how many tumbles you have in this life, so long as you do not get dirty when you tumble; it is only the people who have to stop to be washed and made clean, who must necessarily lose the race. And I can assure you that there is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life. You learn that which is of inestimable importance
-- Thomas Huxley

#Patience #Dirty #Race

I know of no department of natural science more likely to reward a man who goes into it thoroughly than anthropology. There is an immense deal to be done in the science pure and simple, and it is one of those branches of inquiry which brings one into contact with the great problems of humanity in every direction.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Science #Simple #Men

Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Math #May #Stuff

Genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Power #Genius #Gunpowder

That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Independent #Political #Independence

What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Believe #Government #People

The birth of science was the death of superstition.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Science #Superstitions #Birth

For these two years I have been gravitating towards your doctrines, and since the publication of your primula paper with accelerated velocity. By about this time next year I expect to have shot past you, and to find you pitching into me for being more Darwinian than yourself. However, you have set me going, and must just take the consequences, for I warn you I will stop at no point so long as clear reasoning will take me further.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Science #Past #Years

The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome-not by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Art #Teaching #Rome

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

#Lying #Snakes #Cradle

Not far from the invention of fire must rank the invention of doubt.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Fire #Doubt #Invention

No one who has lived in the world as long as you & I have, can entertain the pious delusion that it is engineered upon principles of benevolence... the cosmos remains always beautiful and profoundly interesting in every corner-and if I had as many lives as a cat I would leave no corner unexplored.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Beautiful #Cat #Thinking

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

#Thinking #Past #People

...claiming my right to follow whethersoever science should lead... it is as respectable to be modified monkey as modified dirt.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Thinking #Monkeys #Dirt

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

#Strategy

The foundation of all morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Giving Up #Lying #Believe

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

#Matter #Reason #Consideration

It sounds paradoxical to say the attainment of scientific truth has been effected, to a great extent, by the help of scientific errors.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Errors #Sound #Helping

The student of Nature wonders the more and is astonished the less, the more conversant he becomes with her operations; but of all the perennial miracles she offers to his inspection, perhaps the most worthy of admiration is the development of a plant or of an animal from its embryo.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Animal #Miracle #Development

The mathematician starts with a few propositions, the proof of which is so obvious that they are called self-evident, and the rest of his work consists of subtle deductions from them. The teaching of languages, at any rate as ordinarily practiced, is of the same general nature authority and tradition furnish the data, and the mental operations are deductive.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Nature #Teaching #Self

The Bible account of the creation of Eve is a preposterous fable.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Bible #Fables #Creation

Only one absolute certainty is possible to man, namely that at any given moment the feeling which he has exists.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Men #Feelings #Given

True science and true religion are twin sisters, and the separation of either from the other is sure to prove the death of both. Science prospers exactly in proportion as it is religious; and religion flourishes in exact proportion to the scientific depth and firmness of its basis.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Religious #Depth #Twins

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
-- Thomas Huxley

#Care #I Care #Term

People never will recollect that mere learning and mere cleverness are of next to no value in life, while energy and intellectual grip, the things that are inborn and cannot be taught, are everything.
-- Thomas Huxley

#People #Intellectual #Energy

Each such answer to the great question, invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to be complete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, or it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been a mere approximation to the truth tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Ignorance #Finals #Followers

The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an epoch.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Philosophy #Men #Infidelity

For myself I say deliberately, it is better to have a millstone tied round the neck and be thrown into the sea than to share the enterprises of those to whom the world has turned, and will turn, because they minister to its weaknesses and cover up the awful realities which it shudders to look at.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Reality #Sea #Cover Ups

If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Matter #Evolution #Hypothesis

The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of "Spiritualism" is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a séance .
-- Thomas Huxley

#Suicide #Argument #Guinea

I can assure you that there is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life. You learn that which is of inestimable importance that there are a great many people in the world who are just as clever as you are. You learn to put your trust, by and by, in an economy and frugality of the exercise of your powers, both moral and intellectual; and you very soon find out, if you have not found it out before, that patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Clever #Exercise #People

Can any one deny that the old Israelites conceived Jahveh not only in the image of a man, but in that of a changeable, irritable, and, occasionally, violent man?
-- Thomas Huxley

#Men #Violent #Deny

No man is any the worse off because another acquires wealth by trade, or by the exercise of a profession; on the contrary, he cannot have acquired his wealth except by benefiting others to the extent of what they considered to be its value.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Exercise #Men #Wealth

Science ... warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Science #Views #Trying

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

#Charity #Littles

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.
-- Thomas Huxley

#Shooting #Rats #Able