Thomas Huxley Quotes about Science

Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.

The birth of science was the death of superstition.

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

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

Science is simply common sense at its best.

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.

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

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

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

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.

A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man who plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric.

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

Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.

What men of science want is only a fair day's wages for more than a fair day's work.

For these two years I have been gravitating towards your doctrines, and since the publication of your primula paper with accelerated velocity. By about this time next year I expect to have shot past you, and to find you pitching into me for being more Darwinian than yourself. However, you have set me going, and must just take the consequences, for I warn you I will stop at no point so long as clear reasoning will take me further.

I know no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution of humanity, as it is set forth in the annals of history. Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than the other brutes, a blind prey to impulses, which as often as not led him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence a terror and a burden, and fill his physical life with barren toil and battle.

[Scientists] have learned to respect nothing but evidence, and to believe that their highest duty lies in submitting to it however it may jar against their inclinations.

Man's Place in Nature.

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

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodeling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the direction of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward.

Whatever evil voices may rage, Science, secure among the powers that are eternal, will do her work and be blessed.

All knowledge is good. It is impossible to say any fragment of knowledge, however insignificant or remote from one's ordinary pursuits, may not some day be turned to account.