Thomas Huxley Quotes

The clergy are at present divided into three sections: an immense body who are ignorant; a small proportion who know and are silent; and a minute minority who know and speak according to their knowledge.

If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.

I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a physical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.

A man who speaks out honestly and fearlessly that which he knows, and that which he believes, will always enlist the good will and the respect, however much he may fail in winning the assent, of his fellow men.

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

Claiming my right to follow whethersoever science should lead ... it is as respectable to be modified monkey as modified dirt.

Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.

A good man: body serves his will and enjoys hard work, clear intellect that understands the truths of nature, full of passion for life but controlled by his will, well-developed conscience, loves beauty in art and nature, despises inferior morality, respects himself and others.

Missionaries, whether of philosophy or religion, rarely make rapid way, unless their preachings fall in with the prepossessions ofthe multitude of shallow thinkers, or can be made to serve as a stalking-horse for the promotion of the practical aims of the still larger multitude, who do not profess to think much, but are quite certain they want a great deal.

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

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

Whatever evil voices may rage, Science, secure among the powers that are eternal, will do her work and be blessed.

Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty, and self-respect are the qualities which make a real gentleman or lady.

To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach him something of natural history, and you place in his hands a catalogue of those which are worth turning around. Surely our innocent pleasures are not so abundant in this life, that we can afford to despise this or any other source of them.

Within the last fifty years, the extraordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent.

No man is any the worse off because another acquires wealth by trade, or by the exercise of a profession; on the contrary, he cannot have acquired his wealth except by benefiting others to the extent of what they considered to be its value.

The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddle sink into insignificance.

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

Veracity is the heart of morality.

A drop of water is as powerful as a thunder-bolt.

Natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality.

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.

We are prone to see what lies behind our eyes, rather than what apprears before them.

No one who has lived in the world as long as you & I have, can entertain the pious delusion that it is engineered upon principles of benevolence ... the cosmos remains always beautiful and profoundly interesting in every corner-and if I had as many lives as a cat I would leave no corner unexplored.

Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.

To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one's life with due thought for the morrow because no man can be sure he will alive an hour hence.

Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best.

The supernatural is being swept out of the universe in the flood of new knowledge of what is natural. It will soon be as impossible for an intelligent, educated man or woman to believe in a god as it is now to believe that earth is flat, that flies can be spontaneously generated, that disease is a divine punishment, or that death is always due to witchcraft.

I'd rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop.

Friendship involves many things but, above all the power of going outside oneself and appreciating what is noble and loving in another.

I conceive that the leading characteristic of the nineteenth century has been the rapid growth of the scientific spirit, the consequent application of scientific methods of investigation to all the problems with which the human mind is occupied, and the correlative rejection of traditional beliefs which have proved their incompetence to bear such investigation.

Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness.

And when you cannot prove that people are wrong, but only that they are absurd, the best course is to let them alone.

I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?

The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist.

People may talk about intellectual teaching, but what we principally want is the moral teaching.

The antagonism between science and religion, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitiousfabricated, on the one hand, by short-sighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally short-sighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance

Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.

It seems safe to look forward to the time when the conception of attractive and repulsive forces, having served its purpose as a useful piece of scientific scaffolding, will be replaced by the deduction of the phenomena known as attraction and repulsion, from the general laws of motion.

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

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

In the world of letters, learning and knowledge are one, and books are the source of both; whereas in science, as in life, learning and knowledge are distinct, and the study of things, and not of books, is the source of the latter.

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.

Only one absolute certainty is possible to man, namely that at any given moment the feeling which he has exists.

No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man ... it is simply incredible to think that ... he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.

I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his own share with more courage and submission.

There is nothing of permanent value (putting aside a few human affections) nothing that satisfies quiet reflection
except the sense of having worked according to one's capacity and light to make things clear and get rid of cant and shams of all sorts.

I know of no department of natural science more likely to reward a man who goes into it thoroughly than anthropology. There is an immense deal to be done in the science pure and simple, and it is one of those branches of inquiry which brings one into contact with the great problems of humanity in every direction.

What men of science want is only a fair day's wages for more than a fair day's work.

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

There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.

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

All knowledge is good. It is impossible to say any fragment of knowledge, however insignificant or remote from one's ordinary pursuits, may not some day be turned to account.

In matters of intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard for any other consideration.

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.

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

A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.

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 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.

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.

A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric ...

Matter and force are the two names of the one artist who fashions the living as well as the lifeless.

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

Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?

The only objections that have occurred to me are, 1st that you have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting Natura non facit saltum so unreservedly ... And 2nd, it is not clear to me why, if continual physical conditions are of so little moment as you suppose, variation should occur at all. However, I must read the book two or three times more before I presume to begin picking holes.

If there is anything in the world which I do firmly believe in, it is the universal validity of the law of causation.

The besetting sin of able men is impatience of contradiction and of criticism. Even those who do their best to resist the temptation, yield to it almost unconsciously and become the tools of toadies and flatterers. "Authorities," "disciples," and "schools" are the curse of science and do more to interfere with the work of the scientific spirit than all its enemies.

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

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

The Bible account of the creation of Eve is a preposterous fable.

Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle which is as much ethical as intellectual.

If the twentieth century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will be because there are among us men who walk in Priestley's footsteps ... To all eternity, the sum of truth and right will have been increased by their means; to all eternity, falsehoods and injustice will be the weaker because they have lived.

It does not matter how many tumbles you have in this life, so long as you do not get dirty when you tumble; it is only the people who have to stop to be washed and made clean, who must necessarily lose the race. And I can assure you that there is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life. You learn that which is of inestimable importance

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

That man, I think, has had a liberal education, who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will.

Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as with alcohol or with bang and produce, be dint of serious thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania.

The student of Nature wonders the more and is astonished the less, the more conversant he becomes with her operations; but of all the perennial miracles she offers to his inspection, perhaps the most worthy of admiration is the development of a plant or of an animal from its embryo.

I care not what subject is taught, if only it be taught well.

Each such answer to the great question, invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to be complete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, or it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been a mere approximation to the truth tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors.

Action is the catalyst that creates accomplishments. It is the path that takes us from uncrafted hopes to realized dreams.

Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.

If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion-I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.

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.

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

Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a seance.

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

That which endures is not one or another association of living forms, but the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of which these are among the transitory expressions.

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

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.

People never will recollect that mere learning and mere cleverness are of next to no value in life, while energy and intellectual grip, the things that are inborn and cannot be taught, are everything.

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.

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

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.

Cherish [Science], venerate her, follow her methods faithfully ... and the future of this people will be greater than the past.

Next to being right in this world, the best of all things is to be clearly and definitely wrong, because you will come out somewhere. If you go buzzing about between right and wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come out nowhere; but if you are absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong, you must, some of these days, have the extreme good fortune of knocking your head against a fact, and that sets you all straight again.

Unfortunately, it is much easier to shut one's eyes to good than to evil. Pain and sorrow knock at our doors more loudly than pleasure and happiness; and the prints of their heavy footsteps are less easily effaced.

Unity of plan everywhere lies hidden under the mask: of diversity of structure-the complex is everywhere evolved out of the simple.

What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin.

Not only does every animal live at the expense of some other animal or plant, but the very plants are at war ... The individuals of a species are like the crew of a foundered ship, and none but good swimmers have a chance of reaching the land.

For every man the world is as fresh as it was at the first day, and as full of untold novelties for him who has the eyes to see them.