Quotes By Thomas Huxley

Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.

I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and would up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.

The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.

It is the customary fate of new truths, to begin as heresies, and to end as superstitions.

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

Surely there is a time to submit to guidance and a time to take one's own way at all hazards.

The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.

It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.

Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.

The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.

I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.

Learn what is true in order to do what is right.

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.

There is but one right, and the possibilities of wrong are infinite.

Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.

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

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

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.

The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.

Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.