Thomas Huxley Quotes - Page 3

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

All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.

The supernatural is being swept out of the universe in the flood of new knowledge of what is natural. It will soon be as impossible for an intelligent, educated man or woman to believe in a god as it is now to believe that earth is flat, that flies can be spontaneously generated, that disease is a divine punishment, or that death is always due to witchcraft.

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.

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

Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.

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.

Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as with alcohol or with bang and produce, be dint of serious thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania.

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.

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.

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.

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

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

Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.

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.

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

There is assuredly no more effectual method of clearing up one's own mind on any subject than by talking it over, so to speak, with men of real power and grasp, who have considered it from a totally different point of view.

Common sense is science exactly in so far as it fulfills the ideal of common sense; that is, sees facts as they are, or at any rate, without the distortion of prejudice, and reasons from them in accordance with the dictates of sound judgment. And science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

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.

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

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.

Veracity is the heart of morality.

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?

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.

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