Thomas Henry Huxley Quotes

344 Sourced Quotes

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is, to my mind, a very dangerous adage. If knowledge is real and genuine, I do not believe that it is other than a very valuable possession, however infinitesimal its quantity may be. Indeed, if a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

Thomas Henry Huxley
The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The practical men believed that the idol whom they worship - rule of thumb - has been the source of the past prosperity, and will suffice for the future welfare of the arts and manufactures.

Thomas Henry Huxley
I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?

Thomas Henry Huxley
A single book tells us more than Methuselah could have learned, had he spent every waking hour of his thousand years in learning.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Not only does every animal live at the expense of some other animal or plant, but the very plants are at war.... The individuals of a species are like the crew of a foundered ship, and none but good swimmers have a chance of reaching the land.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Unless that which is taught is based on actual observation and familiarity with facts, it is better left alone.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Harmonious order governing eternally continuous progress - the web and woof of matter and force interweaving by slow degrees, without a broken thread, that veil which lies between us and the Infinite - that universe which alone we know or can know; such is the picture which science draws of the world.

Thomas Henry Huxley
No explanation of anything can be complete, because human knowledge, at its best, goes but a very little way back towards the beginning of things.

Thomas Henry Huxley
What people call applied science is nothing but the application of pure science to particular classes of problems.

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

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

Thomas Henry Huxley
Physical science therefore rests on verified or uncontradicted hypotheses; and, such being the case, it is not surprising that a great condition of its progress has been the invention of verifiable hypotheses.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Whatever happens, science may bide her time in patience and in confidence.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Every art is full of conceptions which are special to itself; and, as the use of language is to convey our conceptions to one another, language must supply signs for those conceptions.

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

Thomas Henry Huxley
I often wish that this phrase "applied science," had never been invented. For it suggests that there is a sort of scientific knowledge of direct practical use, which can be studied apart from another sort of scientific knowledge, which is of no practical utility, and which is termed "pure science." But there is no more complete fallacy than this.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle.... Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The whole of modern thought is steeped in science; it has made its way into the works of our best poets, and even the mere man of letters, who affects to ignore and despise science, is unconsciously impregnated with her spirit, and indebted for his best products to her methods.

Thomas Henry Huxley
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 Henry Huxley
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 Henry Huxley
Addressing myself to you, as teachers, I would say, mere book learning in physical science is a sham and a delusion — what you teach, unless you wish to be impostors, that you must first know; and real knowledge in science means personal acquaintance with the facts, be they few or many.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Ancient traditions, when tested by the severe processes of modern investigation, commonly enough fade away into mere dreams: but it is singular how often the dream turns out to have been a half-waking one, presaging a reality.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Whatever practical people may say, this world is, after all, absolutely governed by ideas, and very often by the wildest and most hypothetical ideas.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Not only do I disbelieve in the need for compensation, but I believe that the seeking for rewards and punishments out of this lifeleads men to a ruinous ignorance of the fact that their inevitable rewards and punishments are here.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Accuracy is the foundation of everything else.

Thomas Henry Huxley
To the present generation, that is to say, the people a few years on the hither and thither side of thirty, the name of Charles Darwin stands alongside of those of Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday; and, like them, calls up the grand ideal of a searcher after truth and interpreter of Nature.

Thomas Henry Huxley
That which endures is not one or another association of living forms, but the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of which these are among the transitory expressions.

Thomas Henry Huxley