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The known is finite, the unknown infinite spiritually we find ourselves on a tiny island in the middle of a boundless ocean of the inexplicable. It is our task, from generation to generation, to drain a small amount of additional land.

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
Infinite
Island
Generations
Islands
Drain
Amount
Unknown
Inexplicable
Land
Task
Drains
Middle
Tasks
Additional
Small
Tiny
Spiritually
Known
Generation
Boundless
Find
Ocean
Finite

More quotes by Thomas Huxley

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Science is simply common sense at its best.
Thomas Huxley
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If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.
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The saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is, to my mind, a very dangerous adage. If knowledge is real and genuine, I do not believe that it is other than a very valuable posession, however infinitesimal its quantity may be. Indeed, if a little knowledge is dangerous, where is a man who has so much as to be out of danger?
Thomas Huxley
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A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.
Thomas Huxley
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I do not say think as I think, but think in my way. Fear no shadows, least of all in that great spectre of personal unhappiness which binds half the world to orthodoxy.
Thomas Huxley
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Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.
Thomas Huxley
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The student of Nature wonders the more and is astonished the less, the more conversant he becomes with her operations but of all the perennial miracles she offers to his inspection, perhaps the most worthy of admiration is the development of a plant or of an animal from its embryo.
Thomas Huxley
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I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything...
Thomas Huxley
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Every living creature commences its existence under a form different from, and simpler than, that which it eventually attains.
Thomas Huxley
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People never will recollect that mere learning and mere cleverness are of next to no value in life, while energy and intellectual grip, the things that are inborn and cannot be taught, are everything.
Thomas Huxley
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We live in the hope and faith that, by the advance of molecular physics, we shall by-and-by be able to see our way as clearly from the constituents of water to the properties of water, as we are now able to deduce the operations of a watch from the form of its parts and the manner in which they are put together.
Thomas Huxley
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In the world of letters, learning and knowledge are one, and books are the source of both whereas in science, as in life, learning and knowledge are distinct, and the study of things, and not of books, is the source of the latter.
Thomas Huxley
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What men of science want is only a fair day's wages for more than a fair day's work.
Thomas Huxley
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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.
Thomas Huxley
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Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.
Thomas Huxley
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Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.
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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The rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature.
Thomas Huxley
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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.
Thomas Huxley
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It is a popular delusion that the scientific enquirer is under an obligation not to go beyond generalisation of observed facts...but anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond the facts, rarely get as far.
Thomas Huxley