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The known is finite, the unknown infinite intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.

Thomas Huxley

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Thomas Huxley
Age: 70 †
Born: 1825
Born: May 4
Died: 1895
Died: June 29
Anatomist
Anthropologist
Biologist
Carcinologist
Ichthyologist
Linguist
Naturalist
Paleontologist
Philosopher
Photographer
Physiologist
Lexington
Kentucky
T. H. Huxley
Huxley
Littles
Generation
Intellectually
Little
Ocean
Possessions
Every
Infinite
Finite
Something
Generations
Extent
Stand
Unknown
Illimitable
Land
Midst
Solidity
Known
Add
Reclaim
Business
Possession
Illuminating

More quotes by Thomas Huxley

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Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog.
Thomas Huxley
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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
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. . . I fail to find a trace [in Protestantism] of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is a proposal to change masters. From being a slave of the papacy, the intellect was to become the serf of the Bible.
Thomas Huxley
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Life is too short to occupy oneself with the slaying of the slain more than once.
Thomas Huxley
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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.
Thomas Huxley
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Natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the ideas which can alone still spiritual cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the laws of comfort, has been driven to discover those of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality.
Thomas Huxley
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A man who speaks out honestly and fearlessly that which he knows, and that which he believes, will always enlist the good will and the respect, however much he may fail in winning the assent, of his fellow men.
Thomas Huxley
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If the twentieth century is to be better than the nineteenth, it will be because there are among us men who walk in Priestley's footsteps....To all eternity, the sum of truth and right will have been increased by their means to all eternity, falsehoods and injustice will be the weaker because they have lived.
Thomas Huxley
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Not only do I disbelieve in the need for compensation, but I believe that the seeking for rewards and punishments out of this lifeleads men to a ruinous ignorance of the fact that their inevitable rewards and punishments are here.
Thomas Huxley
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The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.
Thomas Huxley
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What would become of the garden if the gardener treated all the weeds and slugs and birds and trespassers as he would like to be treated, if he were in their place?
Thomas Huxley
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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.
Thomas Huxley
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God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.
Thomas Huxley
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My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.
Thomas Huxley
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Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!
Thomas Huxley
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Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.
Thomas Huxley
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Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say that he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.
Thomas Huxley
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It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodeling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the direction of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward.
Thomas Huxley
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In truth, the laboratory is the forecourt of the temple of philosophy, and whoso has not offered sacrifices and undergone purification there has little chance of admission into the sanctuary.
Thomas Huxley
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And when you cannot prove that people are wrong, but only that they are absurd, the best course is to let them alone.
Thomas Huxley