THOMAS HUXLEY

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

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

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.

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

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

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.

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.

Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.

The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.

No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.

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.

It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.

Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.

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.

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.

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.

My business is to teach my aspirations to confirm themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.

Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.

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.

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.

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.