Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
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Quotes by Thomas Huxley
Explore 25 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Thomas Huxley. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
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Selected quotes by Thomas Huxley
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
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.
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.
The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.
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.
Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.
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.
Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against 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.
Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.
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.
Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.
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 not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.
The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.
Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third.
Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!
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.
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