Thomas Henry Huxley Quotes

344 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
Science in England does everything — but pay. You may earn praise but not pudding.

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

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

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
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
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
Spencer's idea of a tragedy is a deduction killed by a fact.

Thomas Henry Huxley
If Man be separated by no greater structural barrier from the brutes than they are from one another—then it seems to follow that if any process of physical causation can be discovered by which the genera and families of ordinary animals have been produced, that process of causation is amply sufficient to account for the origin of Man.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Genius as an explosive power beats gunpowder hollow; and if knowledge, which should give that power guidance, is wanting, the chances are not small that the rocket will simply run amuck among friends and foes.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practicedby every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones.

Thomas Henry Huxley
No man... who is endowed with a fair share of common sense, and not more than a fair share of vanity, will identify either contemporary or posthumous fame with the highest good.

Thomas Henry Huxley
I conceive that the leading characteristic of the nineteenth century has been the rapid growth of the scientific spirit, the consequent application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems with which the human mind is occupied, and the correlative rejection of traditional beliefs which have proved their incompetence to bear such investigation.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The great benefit which a scientific education bestows, whether as training or as knowledge, is dependent upon the extent to which the mind of the student is brought into immediate contact with the facts — upon the degree to which he learns the habit of appealing directly to Nature.

Thomas Henry Huxley
It is better to read a little and thoroughly than cram a crude undigested mass into my head, though it be great in quantity.

Thomas Henry Huxley