Quotes About Thomas Huxley
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Some experience of popular lecturing had convinced me that the necessity of making things plain to uninstructed people, was one of the very best means of clearing up the obscure corners in one's own mind. ~ Thomas Huxley
Freedom and order are not incompatible ... truth is strength ... free discussion is the very life of truth. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a seance. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
Matter and force are the two names of the one artist who fashions the living as well as the lifeless. ~ Thomas Huxley
Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men. ~ Thomas Huxley
I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'. ~ Thomas Huxley
As for your doctrines I am prepared to go to the Stake if requisite ... I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse & misrepresentation which unless I greatly mistake is in store for you ... And as to the curs which will bark and yelp - you must recollect that some of your friends at any rate are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often & justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead - I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness. ~ Thomas Huxley
I am not afraid of the priests in the long-run. Scientific method is the white ant which will slowly but surely destroy their fortifications. And the importance of scientific method in modern practical life
always growing and increasing
is the guarantee for the gradual emancipation of the ignorant upper and lower classes, the former of whom especially are the strength of the priests. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
The very existence of society depends on the fact that every member of it tacitly admits he is not the exclusive possessor of himself, and that he admits the claim of the polity of which he forms a part, to act, to some extent, as his master. ~ Thomas Huxley
The Bible account of the creation of Eve is a preposterous fable. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
I care not what subject is taught, if only it be taught well. ~ Thomas Huxley
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? ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
Creation,' in the ordinary sense of the word, is perfectly conceivable. I find no difficulty in conceiving that, at some former period, this universe was not in existence, and that it made its appearance in six days (or instantaneously, if that is preferred), in consequence of the volition of some preexisting Being. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
Unity of plan everywhere lies hidden under the mask: of diversity of structure-the complex is everywhere evolved out of the simple. ~ Thomas Huxley
Life is like walking along a crowded street
there always seem to be fewer obstacles to getting along on the opposite pavement
and yet, if one crosses over, matters are rarely mended. ~ Thomas Huxley
When Dirac was an old man, younger physicists often asked him how he felt when he discovered the [Dirac] equation. From his replies, it seems that he alternated between ecstasy and fear: although elated to have solved his problem so neatly, he worried that he would be the latest victim of the 'great tragedy of science' described in 1870 by Thomas Huxley; 'the slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact'. Dirac later confessed that his dread of such an outcome was so intense that he was 'too scared' to use it to make detailed predictions of the energy levels of atomic hydrogen - a test that he knew it had to pass. He did an approximate version of the calculation and showed that there was acceptable agreement but did not go on to risk failure by subjecting his theory to a more rigorous examination. ~ Graham Farmelo
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
There is no sadder sight in the world than to see a beautiful theory killed by a brutal fact. ~ Thomas Huxley
Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium. ~ Thomas Huxley
Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing? ~ Thomas Huxley
People complain of the unequal distribution of wealth [but it is a far greater] injustice that any one man should have the power to write so many brilliant essays ... There is no one who writes like [Thomas Huxley]. ~ Charles Darwin
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
Not far from the invention of fire must rank the invention of doubt. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
If there is anything in the world which I do firmly believe in, it is the universal validity of the law of causation. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty, and self-respect are the qualities which make a real gentleman or lady. ~ Thomas Huxley
Action is the catalyst that creates accomplishments. It is the path that takes us from uncrafted hopes to realized dreams. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
Mix salt and sand, and it shall puzzle the wisest of men, with his mere natural appliances, to separate all the grains of sand from all the grains of salt; but a shower of rain will effect the same object in ten minutes. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely. ~ Thomas Huxley
Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing. ~ Thomas Huxley
The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear. ~ Thomas Huxley
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 ~ Thomas Huxley
Whatever evil voices may rage, Science, secure among the powers that are eternal, will do her work and be blessed. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech whereby he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of individual life in other animals; so that he now stands raised above it as on a mountain-top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
Luther Burbank was born in a brick farmhouse in Lancaster Mass,
he walked through the woods one winter
crunching through the shinycrusted snow
stumbling into a little dell where a warm spring was
and found the grass green and weeds sprouting
and skunk cabbage pushing up a potent thumb,
He went home and sat by the stove and read Darwin
Struggle for Existence Origin of Species Natural
Selection that wasn't what they taught in church,
so Luther Burbank ceased to believe moved to Lunenburg,
found a seedball in a potato plant
sowed the seed and cashed in on Darwin's Natural Selection
on Spencer and Huxley
with the Burbank potato.
Young man go west;
Luther Burbank went to Santa Rosa
full of his dream of green grass in winter ever-
blooming flowers ever-
bearing berries; Luther Burbank
could cash in on Natural Selection Luther Burbank
carried his apocalyptic dream of green grass in winter
and seedless berries and stoneless plums and thornless roses brambles cactus -
winters were bleak in that bleak
brick farmhouse in bleak Massachusetts -
out to sunny Santa Rosa;
and he was a sunny old man
where roses bloomed all year
everblooming everbearing
hybrids.
America was hybrid
America could cash in on Natural Selection.
He was an infidel he believed in Darwin and Natural
Selection and the influence of the mighty deadJohn Dos Passos
In matters of intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard for any other consideration. ~ Thomas Huxley
I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of yourminds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature. ~ Thomas Huxley
Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom-box. ~ Thomas Huxley
In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact. ~ Thomas Huxley
The dogma of the infallibility of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of the popes. ~ Thomas Huxley
I have always been, am, and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I have ever proposed to myself is to say, this and this I have learned; thus and thus have I learned it; go thou and learn better; but do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, conclusions the value of which you ought to have tested for yourself. ~ Thomas Huxley
My fundamental axiom of speculative philosophy is that materialism and spiritualism are opposite poles of the same absurdity-the absurdity of imagining that we know anything about either spirit or matter. ~ Thomas Huxley
The man who is all morality and intellect, although he may be good and even great, is, after all, only half a man. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
Only a scientific people can survive in a scientific future. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
True science and true religion are twin sisters, and the separation of either from the other is sure to prove the death of both. Science prospers exactly in proportion as it is religious; and religion flourishes in exact proportion to the scientific depth and firmness of its basis. ~ Thomas Huxley
The child who has been taught to make an accurate elevation, plan, and section of a pint pot has had an admirable training in accuracy of eye and hand. ~ Thomas Huxley
Learn what is true in order to do what is right. ~ 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. ~ Thomas Huxley
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 ~ Thomas Huxley
What men of science want is only a fair day's wages for more than a fair day's work. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
I'd rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop. ~ Thomas Huxley
Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth. ~ Thomas Huxley
The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
Friendship involves many things but, above all the power of going outside oneself and appreciating what is noble and loving in another. ~ Thomas Huxley
Only one absolute certainty is possible to man, namely that at any given moment the feeling which he has exists. ~ Thomas Huxley
Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once. ~ Thomas Huxley
Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. ~ Thomas Huxley
The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
If a man cannot see a church, it is preposterous to take his opinion about its altar-piece or painted window. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect. ~ Thomas Huxley
Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah. ~ Thomas Huxley
"Agnostic" is a much more recent word than "atheist", coined by Thomas Huxley in 1869 to mean "without knowledge of God" and acquiring the usage of "being doubtful about the existence of God." ~ Jim Herrick
Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness. ~ Thomas Huxley
Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness. ~ Thomas Huxley
There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything especially as I am now so much occupied with theology but I don't see my way to your conclusion. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
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. ~ Thomas Huxley
As if to demonstrate, by a striking example, the impossibility of erecting any cerebral barrier between man and the apes, Nature has provided us, in the latter animals, with an almost complete series of gradations from brains little higher than that of a Rodent, to brains little lower than that of Man. ~ Thomas Huxley
