Quotes By Thomas Huxley

The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.

Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.

Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.

If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had better turn to hand work it is an indication on Nature's part that she did not mean him to be a head worker.

I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'.

The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.

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

The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.

I am content with nothing, restless and ambitious... and I despise myself for the vanity, which formed half the stimulus to my exertions. Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.

In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.

The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed.

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.

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

The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth.

Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.

No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?