Top 200 Thomas Henry Huxley Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything especially as I am now so much occupied with theology but I don’t see my way to your conclusion.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

153. “Surely there is a time to submit to guidance and a time to take one’s own way at all hazards.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

154. “Genius as an explosive power beats gunpowder hollow; and if knowledge, which should give that power guidance, is wanting, the chances are not small that the rocket will simply run amuck among friends and foes.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

155. “What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

156. “There is no absurdity in theology so great that you cannot parallel it by a greater absurdity in Nature.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

157. “Agnosticism is not properly described as a “negative” creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle which is as much ethical as intellectual.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

158. “Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

159. “As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

160. “That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to State of Nature, the State of Art of an organized polity; in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy civilization.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

161. “Only one absolute certainty is possible to man, namely that at any given moment the feeling which he has exists.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

162. “No one can help another very much in these crises of life; but love and sympathy count for something.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

163. “Material advancement has its share in moral and intellectual progress. Becky Sharp’s acute remark that it is not difficult to be virtuous on ten thousand a year has its applications to nations; and it is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

164. “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 Henry Huxley

165. “And when you cannot prove that people are wrong, but only that they are absurd, the best course is to let them alone.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

166. “If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

167. “The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

168. “The student of Nature wonders the more and is astonished the less, the more conversant he becomes with her operations; but of all the perennial miracles she offers to his inspection, perhaps the most worthy of admiration is the development of a plant or of an animal from its embryo.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

169. “What men of science want is only a fair day’s wages for more than a fair day’s work.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

171. “Whatever part of the animal fabric whatever series of muscles, whatever viscera might be selected for comparison the result would be the same the lower Apes and the Gorilla would differ more than the Gorilla and the Man.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

172. “Of the few innocent pleasures left to men past middle life, the jamming of common sense down the throats of fools is perhaps the keenest.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

173. “I wish you would let an old man, who has had his share of fighting, remind you that battles, like hypotheses, are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

174. “I have never been able to understand why pigeon-shooting at Hurlingham should be refined and polite, while a rat-killing match in Whitechapel is low.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

175. “In truth, the laboratory is the forecourt of the temple of philosophy, and whoso has not offered sacrifices and undergone purification there has little chance of admission into the sanctuary.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

176. “I doubt the fact, to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in grand words asking me to believe a thing because I like it.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

178. “Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

179. “Surely it must be plain that an ingenious man could speculate without end on both sides, and find analogies for all his dreams. Nor does it help me to tell me that the aspirations of mankind.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

181. “A well-worn adage advises those who set out upon a great enterprise to count the cost, yet some of the greatest enterprises have succeeded because the people who undertook them did not count the cost.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

182. “Deduction, which takes us from the general proposition to facts again-teaches us, if I may so say, to anticipate from the ticket what is inside the bundle.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

183. “Not only do I disbelieve in the need for compensation, but I believe that the seeking for rewards and punishments out of this lifeleads men to a ruinous ignorance of the fact that their inevitable rewards and punishments are here.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

184. “I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his own share with more courage and submission.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

185. “It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

186. “To say that an idea is necessary is simply to affirm that we cannot conceive the contrary; and the fact that we cannot conceive the contrary of any belief may be a presumption, but is certainly no proof, of its truth.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

187. “That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

188. “The occurrence of successive forms of life upon our globe is an historical fact, which cannot be disputed; and the relation of these successive forms, as stages of evolution of the same type, is established in various cases.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

189. “If there is anything in the world which I do firmly believe in, it is the universal validity of the law of causation.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

190. “To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one’s life with due thought for the morrow because no man can be sure he will alive an hour hence.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

191. “In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

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

— Thomas Henry Huxley

193. “The very existence of society depends on the fact that every member of it tacitly admits he is not the exclusive possessor of himself, and that he admits the claim of the polity of which he forms a part, to act, to some extent, as his master.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

194. “Nothing great in science has ever been done by men, whatever their powers, in whom the divine afflatus of the truth-seeker was wanting.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

195. “The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

196. “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

197. “The only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

198. “The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

199. “Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley

200. “I can assure you that there is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life. You learn that which is of inestimable importance – that there are a great many people in the world who are just as clever as you are.”

— Thomas Henry Huxley