Thomas Huxley Quotes

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.

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

Learn what is true in order to do what is right.

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of childhood into maturity.

Skepticism is the highest duty and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

I'd rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop.

It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.

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.

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.

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

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

We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered.

The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

The birth of science was the death of superstition.

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.

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.

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

God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.

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

The only people, scientific or other, who never make mistakes are those who do nothing.

A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.

It is not what we believe, but why we believe it. Moral responsibility lies in diligently weighing the evidence. We must actively doubt; we have to scrutinize our views, not take them on trust. No virtue attached to blindly accepting orthodoxy, however 'venerable'.