Top 30 Thomas Huxley Quotes

I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of ‘agnostic‘.

It is the customary fate of new truths, to begin as heresies, and to end as superstitions.

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

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.

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

My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don’t get right.

I take it that the good of mankind means the attainment, by every man, of all the happiness which he can enjoy without diminishing the happiness of his fellow men.

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

Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.

Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

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

Surely there is a time to submit to guidance and a time to take one’s own way at all hazards.

Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.

In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.

It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.

Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.

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.

I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and would up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.

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

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.

Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.

Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.

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.

The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.

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

The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed.