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Fact I know and Law I know but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?

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
Empty
Law
Fact
Facts
Throwing
Mind
Necessity
Save
Shadow
Atheism

More quotes by Thomas Huxley

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Skepticism is the highest duty and blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
Thomas Huxley
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The only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false.
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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.
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The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.
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Only one absolute certainty is possible to man, namely that at any given moment the feeling which he has exists.
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.
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... our Physick and Anatomy have embraced such infinite varieties of being, have laid open such new worlds in time and space, have grappled, not unsuccessfully, with such complex problems, that the eyes of Vesalius and of Harvey might be dazzled by the sight of the tree that has grown out of their grain of mustard seed.
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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.
Thomas Huxley
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Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a medium hired at a guinea a seance.
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Nothing great in science has ever been done by men, whatever their powers, in whom the divine afflatus of the truth-seeker was wanting.
Thomas Huxley
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That which endures is not one or another association of living forms, but the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of which these are among the transitory expressions.
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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Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah.
Thomas Huxley
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No man is any the worse off because another acquires wealth by trade, or by the exercise of a profession on the contrary, he cannot have acquired his wealth except by benefiting others to the extent of what they considered to be its value.
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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God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.
Thomas Huxley
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I doubt the fact, to begin with, but if it be so even, what is this but in grand words asking me to believe a thing because I like it.
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
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The doctrine of transmigrationÂ… was a means of constructing a plausible vindication of the ways of the cosmos to man Â… none but very hasty thinkers will reject it on the grounds of inherent absurdity.
Thomas Huxley
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Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.
Thomas Huxley