Thomas Henry Huxley quotes - page 2

When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. (Thomas Henry Huxley)
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. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
Missionaries, whether of philosophy or of religion, rarely make rapid way, unless their preachings fall in with the prepossessions of the multitude of shallow thinkers, or can be made to serve as a stalking-horse for the promotion of the practical aims of the still larger multitude, who do not profess to think much, but are quite certain they want a great deal. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
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. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
The man who is all morality and intellect, although he may be good and even great, is, after all, only half a man. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which obtain, but of those who are ethically the best. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a physical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
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. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
I do not advocate burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches. (Thomas Henry Huxley)
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. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an epoch. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school. Nevertheless I know that I am, in spite of myself, exactly what the Christian would call, and, so far as I can see, is justified in calling, atheist and infidel. View quote
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. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science. (Thomas Henry Huxley)
There is but one right, and the possibilities of wrong are infinite. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley
It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance. View quote
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. View quote
Thomas Henry Huxley