Quotes from Thomas Huxley

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

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

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.

I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, will bear his own share with more courage and submission.

Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

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.

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

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

As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention.

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.

There is but one right, and the possibilities of wrong are infinite.

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

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

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

Veracity is the heart of morality.

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

Nothing great in science has ever been done by men, whatever their powers, in whom the divine afflatus of the truth-seeker was wanting.

In truth, the laboratory is the forecourt of the temple of philosophy, and whoso has not offered sacrifices and undergone purification there has little chance of admission into the sanctuary.

My belief is that no human being or society composed of human beings ever did or ever will come to much unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal.

No one can help another very much in these crises of life; but love and sympathy count for something.

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

The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth.

It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty.