68 Quotes By Thomas Huxley


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

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 on history

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

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

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

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

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.
Thomas Huxley on knowledge

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 Huxley on knowledge

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
Thomas Huxley on learning

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

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

I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and would up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.
Thomas Huxley on morning

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 Huxley on nature

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 Huxley on nature

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

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.
Thomas Huxley on nature

Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.
Thomas Huxley on patience

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

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.
Thomas Huxley on politics

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 on power