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

Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.
Thomas Huxley

Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.
Thomas Huxley

Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.
Thomas Huxley

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
Thomas Huxley

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

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
Thomas Huxley

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.
Thomas Huxley

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.
Thomas Huxley

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.
Thomas Huxley


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.
Thomas Huxley

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.
Thomas Huxley

I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'.
Thomas Huxley

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
Thomas Huxley

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.
Thomas Huxley

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.
Thomas Huxley

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.
Thomas Huxley

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
Thomas Huxley

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.
Thomas Huxley

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
Thomas Huxley