Quotes By Thomas Huxley

The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.

Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.

Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.

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

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.

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

Misery is a match that never goes out.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

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'.

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.

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

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

Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

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

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics none in which there is more need of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

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.