Thomas Huxley
My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.
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.
Surely there is a time to submit to guidance and a time to take one's own way at all hazards.
The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.
I am content with nothing, restless and ambitious... and I despise myself for the vanity, which formed half the stimulus to my exertions. Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.
There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.
The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.
I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.
Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.
The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.
There is but one right, and the possibilities of wrong are infinite.
Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.
Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.
My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.
The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.
Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!
It is the customary fate of new truths, to begin as heresies, and to end as superstitions.
Misery is a match that never goes out.
Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.
The child who has been taught to make an accurate elevation, plan, and section of a pint pot has had an admirable training in accuracy of eye and hand.
The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.
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.
The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon.Collection: Ladders
Skepticism is the highest duty and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.Collection: Religion
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.Collection: Life
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of childhood into maturity.Collection: Life
I'd rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop.Collection: Bishops
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.Collection: Determination
It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.Collection: Inspiring
We are prone to see what lies behind our eyes, rather than what apprears before them.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Peace
God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.Collection: Giving
The foundation of all morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.Collection: Giving Up
Not far from the invention of fire we must rank the invention of doubt.Collection: Fire
The only people, scientific or other, who never make mistakes are those who do nothing.Collection: Mistake
Action is the catalyst that creates accomplishments. It is the path that takes us from uncrafted hopes to realized dreams.Collection: Dream
A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.Collection: Freedom
In fact a favourite problem of Tyndall is-Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.Collection: Science
Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before. Some day, I doubt not, we shall arrive at an understanding of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty; but all the understanding in the world will neither increase nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is beautiful and that is ugly.Collection: Beautiful
Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.Collection: Life
Any one who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the "anticipation of Nature," that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with; and, not unfrequently, in spite of a long career of usefulness, turned out to be wholly erroneous in the long run.Collection: Running
I care not what subject is taught, if only it be taught well.Collection: Education
Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.Collection: Work
It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.Collection: Believe
As for your doctrines I am prepared to go to the Stake if requisite ... I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse & misrepresentation which unless I greatly mistake is in store for you... And as to the curs which will bark and yelp - you must recollect that some of your friends at any rate are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often & justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead - I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness.Collection: Mistake
The only objections that have occurred to me are, 1st that you have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting Natura non facit saltum so unreservedly. . . . And 2nd, it is not clear to me why, if continual physical conditions are of so little moment as you suppose, variation should occur at all. However, I must read the book two or three times more before I presume to begin picking holes.Collection: Book
We live in the hope and faith that, by the advance of molecular physics, we shall by-and-by be able to see our way as clearly from the constituents of water to the properties of water, as we are now able to deduce the operations of a watch from the form of its parts and the manner in which they are put together.Collection: Water
The doctrine of transmigrationÂ… was a means of constructing a plausible vindication of the ways of the cosmos to man; Â… none but very hasty thinkers will reject it on the grounds of inherent absurdity.Collection: Mean