Quotes from Thomas Huxley

Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.

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

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

The medieval university looked backwards it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.

Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.

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.

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.

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

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.

Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!

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.

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.

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.

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics none in which there is more need of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.