Thomas Huxley World Quotations

The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.

My experience of the world is that things left to themselves don't get right.

The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.

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.

If there is anything in the world which I do firmly believe in, it is the universal validity of the law of causation.

Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.

A world of facts lies outside and beyond the world of words.

Next to being right in this world, the best of all things is to be clearly and definitely wrong, because you will come out somewhere. If you go buzzing about between right and wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come out nowhere; but if you are absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong, you must, some of these days, have the extreme good fortune of knocking your head against a fact, and that sets you all straight again.

There is no sadder sight in the world than to see a beautiful theory killed by a brutal fact.