Thomas Henry Huxley Quotes

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The properties of living matter distinguish it absolutely from all other kinds of things, and as the present state of knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living.

Thomas Henry Huxley
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 Henry Huxley
My fundamental axiom of speculative philosophy is that materialism and spiritualism are opposite poles of the same absurdity-the absurdity of imagining that we know anything about either spirit or matter.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Cosmic nature is no school of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Next to undue precipitation in anticipating the results of pending investigations, the intellectual sin which is commonest and most hurtful to those who devote themselves to the increase of knowledge is the omission to profit by the experience of their predecessors recorded in the history of science and philosophy.

Thomas Henry Huxley
He had one eye upon fact, and the other on Genesis.

Thomas Henry Huxley
When you aid a teacher, you improve the education of your children. It is a wonder that teachers work as well as they do. I never look at a group of them without using, mentally, the expression, ' The noble army of martyrs '!

Thomas Henry Huxley
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 Henry Huxley
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.

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

Thomas Henry Huxley
Living bodies may be regarded as nothing but extremely complex bundles of forces held in a mass of matter, as the complex forces of a magnet are held in the steel by its coercive force.

Thomas Henry Huxley
It may be well to remember that the highest level of moral aspiration recorded in history was reached by a few ancient Jews--Micah, Isaiah, and the rest--who took no count whatever of what might not happen to them after death. It is not obvious to me why the same point should not by and by be reached by the Gentiles.

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

Thomas Henry Huxley
Uniformitarinism, on the other hand, has with equal justice [to Catastrophism] insisted upon a practically unlimited bank of time, ready to discount any quantity of hypothetical paper. It has kept before our eyes the power of the infinitely little, time being granted, and has compelled us to exhaust known causes, before flying to the unknown.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The student of anatomy is perfectly well aware that there is not a single organ of the human body the structure of which does not vary, to a greater or less extent, in different individuals.

Thomas Henry Huxley
It is an evil, in so far as controversy always tends to degenerate into quarrelling, to swerve from the great issue of what is right and what is wrong to the very small question of who is right and who is wrong.

Thomas Henry Huxley
A world of facts lies outside and f beyond the world of words.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The parallax of time helps us to the true position of a conception, as the parallax of space helps us to that of a star.

Thomas Henry Huxley
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 Henry Huxley
"Law" means a rule which we have always found to hold good, and which we expect always will hold good.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The generalizations of science sweep on in ever-widening circles, and more aspiring flights, through limitless creation.

Thomas Henry Huxley
I do not question for a moment, that while the Mathematician is busied with deductions from general propositions, the Biologist is more especially occupied with observations, comparisons, and those processes which lead to general propositions.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator's show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight — whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given.

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

Thomas Henry Huxley
You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of yourminds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.

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

Thomas Henry Huxley
In truth, the laboratory is the forecourt of the temple of philosophy, and whoso has not offered sacrifices and undergone purification there has little chance of admission into the sanctuary.

Thomas Henry Huxley
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 Henry Huxley
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 Henry Huxley
The Biologist deals with a vast number of properties of objects, and his inductions will not be completed, I fear, for ages to come; but when they are, his science will be as deductive and as exact as the Mathematics themselves.

Thomas Henry Huxley