Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty, and self-respect are the qualities which make a real gentleman or lady, as distinguished from the veneered article which commonly goes by that name.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Man
No man is any the worse off because another acquires wealth by trade, or by the exercise of a profession; on the contrary, he cannot have acquired his wealth except by benefiting others to the extent of what they considered to be its value.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Wealth
Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Science
The world makes up for all its follies and injustices by being damnably sentimental.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Emotions
Fact I know; and Law I know; but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind’s throwing?
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Necessity
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 it.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Influence, Duty
In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Science, Scientists
Patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Patience, Persistence, Perseverance
My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Aspirations
A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Words, Facts
The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Self Respect
No mistake is so commonly made by clever people as that of assuming a cause to be bad because the arguments of its supporters are, to a great extent, nonsensical.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Arguments
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Power, Knowledge, Authority
It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Education
Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peas cods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Mathematics
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.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Authority
The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Bible
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. … .
—Thomas Henry Huxley
The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Morals
God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Facts
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Facts, Follow, Act, Learn, Learning, Give, Will, Nature
There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics—none in which there is more need of good pilots and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Politics
This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but to say that it is the worst is mere petulant nonsense.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: World
The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Science
There is nothing of permanent value (putting aside a few human affections), nothing that satisfies quiet reflection, except the sense of having worked according to one’s capacity and light to make things clear and get rid of cant and shams of all sorts.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Ability
The great end of life is not knowledge, but action.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Inaction, Getting Going, Action, Procrastination, Knowledge
In the natural world ignorance is visited as sharply as willful disobedience; incapacity meets the same punishment as crime.—Nature’s discipline is not even a word and a blow and the blow first, but the blow without the word.—It is left for the sufferer to find out why the blow was given.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Ignorance
Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Reading, Books
It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Topics: Freedom, Right, Better
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
—Thomas Henry Huxley
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- J. B. S. Haldane British Scientist
- Charles Darwin British Naturalist
- E. O. Wilson American Sociobiologist
- Stephen Jay Gould American Paleontologist
- Arthur Eddington English Astronomer
- John Herschel English Mathematician
- Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux Scottish Jurist, Politician
- Jonas Salk American Virologist
- Humphry Davy British Chemist
- Aldous Huxley English Humanist
Leave a Reply