Thomas Henry Huxley Quotes

344 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thomas Henry Huxley
The earth, from the time of the chalk to the present day, has been the theater of a series of changes as vast in their amount as they were slow in their progress. The area on which we stand has been first sea and then land for at least four alterations and has remained in each of these conditions for a period of great length.

Thomas Henry Huxley
A scorner of physic once said that nature and disease may be compared to two men fighting, the doctor to a blind man with a club, who strikes into the melee, sometimes hitting the disease, and sometimes hitting nature.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The teacher should always recollect that his business is to feed, and not to cram the intellect.

Thomas Henry Huxley
"medicine" not merely denotes a kind of knowledge, but it comprehends the various applications of that knowledge to the alleviation of the sufferings, the repair of the injuries, and the conservation of health, of living beings.

Thomas Henry Huxley
If evidence that a thing may be, were equivalent to proof that it is, analogy might justify the construction of a naturalistic theology and demonology not less wonderful than the current supernatural; just as it might justify the peopling of Mars, or of Jupiter, with living forms to which terrestrial biology offers no parallel.

Thomas Henry Huxley
My butterfly-net and pocket magnifying-glass are rare companions for a walk in the country.

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

Thomas Henry Huxley
No educational system can have a claim to permanence unless it recognizes the truth that education has two great ends to which everything else must be subordinated. The one of these is to increase knowledge; the other is to develop the love of right and the hatred of wrong.

Thomas Henry Huxley
It is very desirable to remember that evolution is not an explanation of the cosmic process, but merely a generalized statement of the method and results of that process.

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

Thomas Henry Huxley
The extent of the region of the uncertain, the number of the problems the investigation of which ends in a verdict of not proven, will vary according to the knowledge and the intellectual habits of the individual agnostic. I do not very much care to speak of anything as unknowable. What I am sure about is that there are many topics about which I know nothing, and which, so far as I can see, are out of reach of my faculties. But whether these things are knowable by any one else is exactly one of those matters which is beyond my knowledge, though I may have a tolerably strong opinion as to the probabilities of the case.

Thomas Henry Huxley
In a well worn metaphor, a parallel is drawn between the life of man and the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly; but the comparison may be more just as well as more novel, if for its former term we take the mental progress of the race. History shows that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, periodically grows too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts them asunder to appear in new habiliments, as the feeding and growing grub, at intervals, casts its too narrow skin and assumes another, itself but temporary. Truly the imago state of Man seems to be terribly distant, but every moult is a step gained, and of such there have been many.

Thomas Henry Huxley
English law does not permit good persons, as such, to strangle bad persons, as such.

Thomas Henry Huxley
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 Henry Huxley
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 Henry Huxley