Words matter. These are the best Thomas Huxley Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.
Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.
The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment… not authority.
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
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.
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.
No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.
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.
The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
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.
Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.
History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.
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.
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.
No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.
Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.
The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.
Misery is a match that never goes out.
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 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.
Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.
Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.
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 great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.
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.
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
Surely there is a time to submit to guidance and a time to take one’s own way at all hazards.
The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.
Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.
