Thomas Huxley Quotes

Truth alone will endure, all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time. I must continue to bear testimony to truth even if I am forsaken by all. Mine may today be a voice in the wilderness, but it will be heard when all other voices are silenced, if it is the voice of Truth.

The test of truth in life is not whether we can remember what we learned in school, but whether we are prepared for change.

In all science, error precedes the truth, and it is better it should go first than last.

It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.

Science is a beautiful gift to humanity; we should not distort it.

Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom - that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself.

They whom truth and wisdom lead, can gather honey from a weed.

If we reject science, we reject the common man.

We receive the truths of science by compulsion. Nothing but ignorance is able to resist them.

Truth cannot be defeated.

Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.

The great tragedy of Science --- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact

Science has changed the face of this earth: it has harnessed the forces of Nature -- forces whose secret laws it had first to discover -- it has created practically a new world within the memory of men living….Science -- the scientists -- doesn't pretend to have grasped in its fingers the Eternal Truth …Science doesn't demand that one believe or be damned. Science reasons. Science investigates. Science tests itself….Science works -- builds -- quietly prevails -- promises little and performs much.

Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of intolerance and persecution—unresisting victims in the crusade which ignorance and fanaticism are ever waging against science. When great truths are driven to make an appeal to reason, knowledge becomes criminal, and philosophers martyrs. Truth, however, like all moral powers, can neither be checked nor extinguished. When compressed, it but reacts the more. It crushes where it cannot expand—it burns where it is not allowed to shine.

It is men of science who hold the secret of the mysterious property of the mind by which error ministers to truth, and truth slowly but irrevocably prevails. Theirs is the logic of discovery, the demonstration of the advance of knowledge and the development of ideas, which as the earthly wants and passions of men remain almost unchanged, are the charter of progress, and the vital spark in history.

Every great scientific truth goes through three states: first, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it.

I believe that the future of humanity is in the progress of reason through science. I believe that the pursuit of truth, through science, is the divine ideal which man should propose to himself.

I believe that all is illusion and vanity outside the treasure of truths slowly accumulated, and which will never again be lost. I believe that the sum of these truths, always increasing, will at last confer on man incalculable power and peace, if not happiness. Yes, I believe in the final triumph of life.

We must have the audacity to turn up the frequency of our truths.

Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth... That's the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.

Science has promised us truth...It has never promised us either peace or happiness.

Science, my boy, is composed of errors, but errors that it is right to make, for they lead step by step to the truth.

Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.

No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,- The eternal years of God are hers; But Error, wounded, writhes with pain, And dies among his worshippers.