Thomas Huxley

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

“Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!”

“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.”

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

“Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.”

“Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.”

“Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.”

“Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.”

“Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.”

“Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth.”

“No delusion is greater than the notion that method and industry can make up for lack of mother-wit, either in science or in practical life.”

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

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

“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.”

“The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.”

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