Top 45 Thomas Huxley Quotes

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

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.

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment… not authority.

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

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

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

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.

Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.

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.

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.

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

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

Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.

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

My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

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.

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

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.

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

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

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

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.

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

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

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.

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

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

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

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.