Thomas Henry Huxley Quotes

344 Sourced Quotes

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

Thomas Henry Huxley
We live in the hope and the faith that, by the advance of molecular physics, we shall by and by be able to see our way as clearly from the constituents of water to the properties of water, as we are now able to deduce the operations of a watch from the form of its parts and the manner in which they are put together.

Thomas Henry Huxley
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 Henry Huxley
When the peine forte et dure is over, the antique sincerity of the venerable sufferer always reasserts itself. Genesis is honest to the core, and professes to be no more than it is, a repository of venerable traditions of unknown origin, claiming no scientific authority and possessing none.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The materialistic position that there is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity, is as utterly devoid of justification as the most baseless of theological dogmas.

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

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

Thomas Henry Huxley
When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist, or an idealist; a Christian, or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Magna est veritas etpraevalebit ! Truth is great, certainly, but, considering her greatness, it is curious what a long time she is apt to take about prevailing.

Thomas Henry Huxley
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 Henry Huxley
To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one's life with due thought for the morrow because no man can be sure he will alive an hour hence.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Nature is never in a hurry, and seems to have had always before her eyes the adage, "keep a thing long enough and you will find a use for it.

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

Thomas Henry Huxley
Those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact...

Thomas Henry Huxley
The man of science, in fact, simply uses with scrupulous exactness the methods which we all, habitually and at every moment, use carelessly.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.

Thomas Henry Huxley
I wish not to be in any way confounded with the cynics who delight in degrading man, or with the common run of materialists, who think mind is any the lower for being a function of matter. I dislike them even more than I do the pietists.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Placed side by side, a Humming-bird and a Tortoise, an Ostrich and a Crocodile, offer the strongest contrast, and a Stork seems to have little but animality in common with the Snake it swallows.

Thomas Henry Huxley
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 Henry Huxley
If the twentieth century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will be because there are among us men who walk in Priestley's footsteps....To all eternity, the sum of truth and right will have been increased by their means; to all eternity, falsehoods and injustice will be the weaker because they have lived.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The great danger which besets all men of large speculative faculty, is the temptation to deal with the accepted statements of facts in natural science, as if they were not only correct, but exhaustive; as if they might be dealt with deductively, in the same was a proposition in Euclid may be dealt with.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Bathybius [is] a vast sheet of living matter, enveloping the whole earth beneath the seas.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Rain and river, frost and thaw, wind and wave, however much they may differ among themselves, agree in this - that they are, upon the whole, slow and certain agents of destruction.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Once more, an invariably-recurring lesson of geological history, at whatever point its study is taken up: the lesson of the almost infinite slowness of the modification of living forms. The lines of the pedigrees of living things break off almost before they begin to converge.

Thomas Henry Huxley
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 Henry Huxley
The entire organism may be compared to a web of which the warp is derived from the female and the woof from the male.

Thomas Henry Huxley
You have no idea of the intrigues that go on in this blessed world of science. Science is, I fear, no purer than any other region of human activity; though it should be. Merit alone is very little good; it must be backed by tact and knowledge of the world to do very much.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Our thoughts may be delusive, but they cannot be fictitious. As thoughts, they are real and existent, and the cleverest deceiver cannot make them otherwise.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Any one acquainted with the history of science will admit that its progress has meant, in all ages and now more than ever, the extension of the province of matter and causation, and the gradual banishment from human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity.

Thomas Henry Huxley