Quote

The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the truth of Spiritualism is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a medium hired at a guinea a séance.

Thomas Huxley

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Argument
Crossing
Talk
Crossings
Dies
Additional
Twaddle
Truth
Hired
Sweeper
Better
Demonstration
Sweepers
Live
Medium
Spiritualism
Made
Mediums
Furnish
Good
Suicide
Guinea

More quotes by Thomas Huxley

Image
Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness.
Thomas Huxley
Image
I am content with nothing, restless and ambitious... and I despise myself for the vanity, which formed half the stimulus to my exertions. Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.
Thomas Huxley
Image
It ought not to be unpleasant to say that which one honestly believes or disbelieves. That it so constantly is painful to do so, is quite enough obstacle to the progress of mankind in that most valuable of all qualities, honesty of word or of deed.
Thomas Huxley
Image
I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything especially as I am now so much occupied with theology but I don't see my way to your conclusion.
Thomas Huxley
Image
If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion-I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.
Thomas Huxley
Image
Fact I know and Law I know but what is this Necessity, save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?
Thomas Huxley
Image
That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to State of Nature, the State of Art of an organized polity in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy civilization
Thomas Huxley
Image
Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.
Thomas Huxley
Image
My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.
Thomas Huxley
Image
Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a medium hired at a guinea a seance.
Thomas Huxley
Image
It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.
Thomas Huxley
Image
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
Image
Surely there is a time to submit to guidance and a time to take one's own way at all hazards.
Thomas Huxley
Image
Rome is the one great spiritual organisation which is able to resist and must, as a matter of life and death, the progress of science and modern civilization
Thomas Huxley
Image
I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed by your bigness, or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?
Thomas Huxley
Image
... 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.
Thomas Huxley
Image
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
Image
To say that an idea is necessary is simply to affirm that we cannot conceive the contrary and the fact that we cannot conceive the contrary of any belief may be a presumption, but is certainly no proof, of its truth.
Thomas Huxley
Image
God give me strength to face a fact though it slay me.
Thomas Huxley
Image
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
Thomas Huxley