238 Quotes by Thomas Henry Huxley

Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom-box.

Of the few innocent pleasures left to men past middle life, the jamming of common sense down the throats of fools is perhaps the keenest.

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.

Genius as an explosive power beats gunpowder hollow; and if knowledge, which should give that power guidance, is wanting, the chances are not small that the rocket will simply run amuck among friends and foes.

Friendship involves many things but, above all the power of going outside oneself and appreciating what is noble and loving in another.

To quarrel with the uncertainty that besets us in intellectual affairs would be about as reasonable as to object to live one’s life with due thought for the morrow because no man can be sure he will alive an hour hence.

We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered.

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.