Thomas Henry Huxley - Man Quotes

58 Sourced Quotes

View all Thomas Henry Huxley Quotes
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
Can any one deny that the old Israelites conceived Jahveh not only in the image of a man, but in that of a changeable, irritable, and, occasionally, violent man?

Thomas Henry Huxley
The only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false.

Thomas Henry Huxley
I now propose briefly to... set forth, in a form intelligible to those who possess no special acquaintance with anatomical science, the chief facts upon which all conclusions respecting the nature and the extent of the bonds which connect man with the brute world must be based: I shall then indicate the one immediate conclusion which, in my judgment, is justified by those facts, and I shall finally discuss the bearing of that conclusion upon the hypotheses which have been entertained respecting the Origin of Man.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

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 man who is all morality and intellect, although he may be good and even great, is, after all, only half a man.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Whatever part of the animal fabric—whatever series of muscles, whatever viscera might be selected for comparison—the result would be the same—the lower Apes and the Gorilla would differ more than the Gorilla and the Man.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Even in the important matter of cranial capacity, Men differ more widely from one another than they do from the Apes; while the lowest Apes differ as much, in proportion, from the highest, as the latter does from Man.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The man-like Apes... have certain characters of structure and of distribution in common.

Thomas Henry Huxley
These examples... show that, in whatever proportion of its limbs the Gorilla differs from Man, the other Apes depart still more widely from the Gorilla and that, consequently, such differences of proportion can have no ordinal value.

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
So far as cerebral structure goes... it is clear that Man differs less from the Chimpanzee or the Orang, than these do even from the Monkeys, and that the difference between the brains of the Chimpanzee and of Man is almost insignificant, when compared with that between the Chimpanzee brain and that of a Lemur.

Thomas Henry Huxley
The whole analogy of natural operations furnishes so complete and crushing an argument against the intervention of any but what are termed secondary causes, in the production of all the phenomena of the universe; that, in view of the intimate relations between Man and the rest of the living world; and between the forces exerted by the latter and all other forces, I can see no excuse for doubting that all are co-ordinated terms of Nature's great progression, from the formless to the formed—from the inorganic to the organic—from blind force to conscious intellect and will.

Thomas Henry Huxley
So far from the posterior lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippocampus minor, being structures peculiar to and characteristic of man, as they have been over and over again asserted to be, even after the publication of the clearest demonstration of the reverse, it is precisely these structures which are the most marked cerebral characters common to man with the apes. They are among the most distinctly Simian peculiarities which the human organism exhibits.

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
Whether we take these characters then, or such minor ones as those which are derivable from the proportional length of the spines in the cervical vertebrae, and the like, there is no doubt whatsoever as to the marked difference between Man and the Gorilla; but there is as little, that equally marked differences, of the very same order, obtain between the Gorilla and the lower apes.

Thomas Henry Huxley
It cannot be doubted, I think, that Mr. Darwin has satisfactorily proved that what he terms selection, or selective modification, must occur, and does occur, in nature; and he has also proved to superfluity that such selection is competent to produce forms as distinct, structurally, as some genera even are. If the animated world presented us with none but structural differences, I should have no hesitation in saying that Mr. Darwin has demonstrated the existence of a true physical cause, amply competent to account for the origin of living species, and of man among the rest.

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

Thomas Henry Huxley
The question of questions for mankind—the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other—is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things.

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
I, the man without a rag of a label to cover himself with...took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'.

Thomas Henry Huxley
That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to State of Nature, the State of Art of an organized polity; in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy civilization

Thomas Henry Huxley
I take it that the good of mankind means the attainment, by every man, of all the happiness which he can enjoy without diminishing the happiness of his fellow men

Thomas Henry Huxley
If every man possessed everything he wanted, and no one had the power to interfere with such possession; or if no man desired thatwhich could damage his fellow-man, justice would have no part to play in the universe.

Thomas Henry Huxley
Where, then, must we look for primeval Man? Was the oldest Homo sapiens Pliocene or Miocene, or yet more ancient? In still older strata do the fossilized bones of an ape more anthropoid, or a Man more pithecoid, than any yet known await the researches of some unborn paleontologist?

Thomas Henry Huxley
Regarded anatomically, the resemblances between the foot of Man and the foot of the Gorilla are far more striking and important than the differences.... be the differences between the hand and foot of Man and those of the Gorilla what they may—the differences between those of the Gorilla and those of the lower Apes are much greater.

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
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and, however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.

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