Top 200 Thomas Henry Huxley Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

52. “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

53. “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 Henry Huxley

54. “A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric...”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

55. “Protoplasm, simple or nucleated, is the formal basis of all life. It is the clay of the potter: which, bake it and paint it as hewill, remains clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature from the commonest brick or sun-dried clod.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

56. “Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

57. “In the world of letters, learning and knowledge are one, and books are the source of both; whereas in science, as in life, learning and knowledge are distinct, and the study of things, and not of books, is the source of the latter.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

58. “To persons uninstructed in natural history, their country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

60. “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 Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

63. “Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science, as strangled snakes beside that of Hercules.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

64. “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.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

65. “If the perpetual oscillation of nations between anarchy and despotism is to be replaced by the steady march of self-restraining freedom, it will be because men will gradually bring themselves to deal with political, as they now deal with scientific questions.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

67. “The foundation of all morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

68. “The Bible account of the creation of Eve is a preposterous fable.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

69. “Give unqualified assent to no propositions but those the truth of which is so clear and distinct that they cannot be doubted. The enunciation of this first great commandment of science consecrated doubt.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

70. “The man who is all morality and intellect, although he may be good and even great, is, after all, only half a man.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

71. “Whatever evil voices may rage, Science, secure among the powers that are eternal, will do her work and be blessed.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

72. “Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

73. “It sounds paradoxical to say the attainment of scientific truth has been effected, to a great extent, by the help of scientific errors.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

74. “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

75. “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.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

76. “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 Henry Huxley

77. “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 Henry Huxley

78. “Natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

79. “Only a scientific people can survive in a scientific future.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

80. “Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

81. “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.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

82. “That man, I think, has had a liberal education, who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

83. “A drop of water is as powerful as a thunder-bolt.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

84. “Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom-box.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

85. “What would become of the garden if the gardener treated all the weeds and slugs and birds and trespassers as he would like to be treated, if he were in their place?”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

87. “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 Henry Huxley

88. “If individuality has no play, society does not advance; if individuality breaks out of all bounds, society perishes.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

89. “We are prone to see what lies behind our eyes, rather than what apprears before them.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

90. “Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

91. “Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

92. “Let us have “sweet girl graduates” by all means. They will be none the less sweet for a little wisdom; and the “golden hair” will not curl less gracefully outside the head by reason of there being brains within.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

93. “Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a “medium” hired at a guinea a seance.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

94. “The rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

95. “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 Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

97. “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

98. “I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

99. “There is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

100. “Misery is a match that never goes out.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley