The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon. Thomas Huxley More Quotes by Thomas Huxley More Quotes From Thomas Huxley Within the last fifty years, the extraordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent. Thomas Huxley growth character years 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. Thomas Huxley struggle science thinking Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense. Thomas Huxley common-sense common science The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and governance of things: the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of Theology or of Philosophy, or veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the Poetry of an epoch. Thomas Huxley infidelity men philosophy I can assure you that there is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life. You learn that which is of inestimable importance that there are a great many people in the world who are just as clever as you are. You learn to put your trust, by and by, in an economy and frugality of the exercise of your powers, both moral and intellectual; and you very soon find out, if you have not found it out before, that patience and tenacity of purpose are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness. Thomas Huxley clever exercise people If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state. Thomas Huxley states evolution matter No one can help another very much in these crises of life; but love and sympathy count for something. Thomas Huxley crisis helping I wish you would let an old man, who has had his share of fighting, remind you that battles, like hypotheses, are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Thomas Huxley fighting wish men The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed. Thomas Huxley magna-carta has-beens poor The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of "Spiritualism" is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a séance. Thomas Huxley guinea argument suicide Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. Thomas Huxley size territory doe Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah. Thomas Huxley messiah prophet promise The supernatural is being swept out of the universe in the flood of new knowledge of what is natural. It will soon be as impossible for an intelligent, educated man or woman to believe in a god as it is now to believe that earth is flat, that flies can be spontaneously generated, that disease is a divine punishment, or that death is always due to witchcraft. Thomas Huxley intelligent men believe Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe. Thomas Huxley It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodelling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the directions of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward. Thomas Huxley I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything. Thomas Huxley It is the fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end and superstitions. Thomas Huxley Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat flour from peas cods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data. Thomas Huxley Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. Thomas Huxley 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. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. Thomas Huxley
