Top 200 Thomas Henry Huxley Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Friendship involves many things but, above all the power of going outside oneself and appreciating what is noble and loving in another.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

102. “Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

103. “Mix salt and sand, and it shall puzzle the wisest of men, with his mere natural appliances, to separate all the grains of sand from all the grains of salt; but a shower of rain will effect the same object in ten minutes.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

104. “People may talk about intellectual teaching, but what we principally want is the moral teaching.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

105. “Can any one deny that the old Israelites conceived Jahveh not only in the image of a man, but in that of a changeable, irritable, and, occasionally, violent man?”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

106. “Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

107. “If every man possessed everything he wanted, and no one had the power to interfere with such possession; or if no man desired thatwhich could damage his fellow-man, justice would have no part to play in the universe.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

109. “There are savages without God in any proper sense of the word, but none without ghosts.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

110. “Rome is the one great spiritual organisation which is able to resist and must, as a matter of life and death, the progress of science and modern civilization.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

111. “The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

112. “I’d rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

113. “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 Henry Huxley

114. “It seems safe to look forward to the time when the conception of attractive and repulsive forces, having served its purpose as a useful piece of scientific scaffolding, will be replaced by the deduction of the phenomena known as attraction and repulsion, from the general laws of motion.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

115. “A good man: body serves his will and enjoys hard work, clear intellect that understands the truths of nature, full of passion for life but controlled by his will, well-developed conscience, loves beauty in art and nature, despises inferior morality, respects himself and others.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

116. “Unfortunately, it is much easier to shut one’s eyes to good than to evil. Pain and sorrow knock at our doors more loudly than pleasure and happiness; and the prints of their heavy footsteps are less easily effaced.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

117. “In matters of intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard for any other consideration.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

118. “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 Henry Huxley

119. “A man who speaks out honestly and fearlessly that which he knows, and that which he believes, will always enlist the good will and the respect, however much he may fail in winning the assent, of his fellow men.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

120. “Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

121. “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.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

123. “My belief is that no human being or society composed of human beings ever did or ever will come to much unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

124. “In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

125. “The quarrels of theologians and philosophers have not been about religion, but about philosophy; and philosophers not unfrequently seem to entertain the same feeling toward theologians that sportsmen cherish toward poachers.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

126. “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 Henry Huxley

127. “For myself I say deliberately, it is better to have a millstone tied round the neck and be thrown into the sea than to share the enterprises of those to whom the world has turned, and will turn, because they minister to its weaknesses and cover up the awful realities which it shudders to look at.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

128. “The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddle sink into insignificance.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

129. “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

130. “Though under-instruction is a bad thing, it is not impossible that over-instruction may be worse.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

131. “In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

133. “Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

134. “No man is any the worse off because another acquires wealth by trade, or by the exercise of a profession; on the contrary, he cannot have acquired his wealth except by benefiting others to the extent of what they considered to be its value.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

136. “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.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

137. “The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

138. “Genius, as an explosive power, beats gunpowder hollow.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

140. “To a clear eye the smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

141. “The clergy are at present divided into three sections: an immense body who are ignorant; a small proportion who know and are silent; and a minute minority who know and speak according to their knowledge.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

143. “You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don’t have, at the back of yourminds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

144. “Not far from the invention of fire must rank the invention of doubt.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

145. “If a man cannot see a church, it is preposterous to take his opinion about its altar-piece or painted window.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

146. “In fact a favourite problem of Tyndall is-Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

147. “Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

148. “It is better to read a little and thoroughly than cram a crude undigested mass into my head, though it be great in quantity.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

149. “The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

150. “A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley