Thomas Huxley
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.Collection: Great
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.Collection: Faith
It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.Collection: Wisdom
Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.Collection: Money
Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.Collection: Strength
The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Sad
If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?Collection: Knowledge
The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Happiness
Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.Collection: Science
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.Collection: Knowledge
Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Morning
Learn what is true in order to do what is right.Collection: Truth
The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.Collection: Brainy
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.Collection: Science
Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Wisdom
Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.Collection: Patience
The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.Collection: Business
Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Power
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.Collection: Science
The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Education
Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Politics
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.Collection: Learning
Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.Collection: Equality
Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.
Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.
It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.
The only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false.
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.
Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.
The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed.
The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.
History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'.
Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.
No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
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.