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Quotes by Thomas Henry Huxley

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?
– Thomas Henry Huxley
Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.
– Thomas Henry 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 Henry 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 Henry Huxley
I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
– Thomas Henry Huxley
In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
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.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
Learn what is true in order to do what is right.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
Patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
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.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
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.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
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.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
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.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
The world makes up for all its follies and injustices by being damnably sentimental.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
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.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodelling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the directions of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
Only one absolute certainty is possible to man, namely that at any given moment the feeling which he has exists.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
The strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone.
– Thomas Henry Huxley
There is no greater mistake than the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.
– Thomas Henry Huxley