Thomas Huxley Quotes (80 Quotes)

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.

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

Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.

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

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

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

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.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

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

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

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.

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.

No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.

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

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.

No mistake is so commonly made by clever people as that of assuming a cause to be bad because the arguments of its supporters are, to a great extent, nonsensical

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

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

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.

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 scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

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.

Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.

There is but one right, and the possibilities of wrong are infinite.

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

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.

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

The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth.