T H Huxley Quotes & Sayings

Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life. — Aldous Huxley

BORN: 1856 George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman, Major Barbara), Dublin 1894 Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Crome Yellow), Godalming, England DIED: 1934 Winsor McCay — Tom Nissley

You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases. — Aldous Huxley

The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies. — Aldous Huxley

Religion can hardly revive, because it cannot decay. To put the matter bluntly on the lowest level, it is not to anybody's interest that religion should disappear. If it did, many compositors would be thrown out of work; the audiences of our best-selling scientists would shrink to almost nothing; and the typewriters of the Huxley Brothers would cease from tapping. Without religion the whole human race would die, as according to W. H. R. Rivers, some Melanesian tribes have died, solely of boredom. Every one would be affected: the man who regularly has a run in his car and a round of golf on Sunday, quite as much as the punctilious churchgoer. — T. S. Eliot

Medals are great encouragement to young men and lead them to feel their work is of value, I remember how keenly I felt this when in the 1890s. I received the Darwin Medal and the Huxley Medal. When one is old, one wants no encouragement and one goes on with one's work to the extent of one's power, because it has become habitual. — Karl Pearson

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten. — Aldous Huxley

I'll teach you; I'll make you be free whether you want to be or not. — Aldous Huxley

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions. — Thomas Henry Huxley

Action is the catalyst that creates accomplishments. It is the path that takes us from uncrafted hopes to realized dreams. — Thomas Huxley

People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is - just be a little kinder. — Aldous Huxley

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera. — Aldous Huxley

A gramme is better than a damn, — Aldous Huxley

Isn't it remarkable how everyone who knew [D.H.] Lawrence has felt compelled to write about him? Why, he's had more books written about him than any writer since Byron! — Aldous Huxley

BE KINDER THAN YOU HAVE TO BE. — Aldous Huxley

It is in the light of our beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality that we formulate our conceptions of right and wrong that we frame our conduct, not only in the relations of private life, but also in the sphere of politics and economics. So far from being irrelevant, our metaphysical beliefs are the finally determining factor in all our actions. — Aldous Huxley

For Monet, on this occasion, water lilies were the measure of water lilies; and so he painted them. — Aldous Huxley

The scientific dictator of tomorrow will set up his whispering machines and subliminal projectors in schools and hospitals (children and the sick are highly suggestible), and in all public places where audiences can be given a preliminary softening up by suggestibility-increasing oratory or rituals. — Aldous Huxley

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. - T. H. Huxley, — Carl Sagan

For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols — Aldous Huxley

Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using - you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines? — Aldous Huxley

At one time or another the more fortunate among us make three startling discoveries. Discovery number one: Each one of us has, in varying degree, the power to make others feel better or worse. Discovery two: Making others feel better is much more fun than making them feel worse. Discovery three: Making others feel better generally makes us feel better. — Laura Huxley

Two great appetites of the soul - the urge to independence and self-determination and the urge to self-transcendence - were fused with, and interpreted in the light of, a third - the urge to worship — Aldous Huxley

The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed. — Thomas Huxley

By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything. — H.L. Mencken

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood. — Aldous Huxley

I recall the story of the philosopher and the theologian... The two were engaged in disputation and the theologian used the old quip about a philosopher resembling a blind man, in a dark room, looking for a black cat - which wasn't there. 'That may be,' said the philosopher, 'but a theologian would have found it. — Julian Huxley

You go back to T. H. Huxley, who coined the term, what he said - and I came to believe he is right - is that agnosticism asserts not only that he himself didn't know if there was a God or not, but that nobody could know. — S.T. Joshi

The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction. — Thomas Huxley

How stupid of me not to have thought of it! T. H. Huxley cried upon reading On the Origin of Species. It is a view that has been echoed ever since. Interestingly, — Bill Bryson

Without seeing any reason to believe that women are, on the average, so strong physically, intellectually, or morally, as men, I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that many women are much better endowed in all these respects than many men, and I am at a loss to understand on what grounds of justice or public policy a career which is open to the weakest and most foolish of the male sex should be forcibly closed to women of vigor and capacity. — Thomas Huxley

Academics and scientists too easily enjoy the role of secular priesthood given them in the nineteenth century by T. H. Huxley in particular. — Simon James

Natural selection rendered evolution scientifically intelligible: it was this more than anything else which convinced professional biologists like Sir Joseph Hooker, T. H. Huxley and Ernst Haeckel. — Charles Darwin

Nothing could assuage the secular grief that was your heritage. — Aldous Huxley

Orwell's '1984' convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley's 'Brave New World' suggested that the totalitarian systems of the future might be subservient and ingratiating. — J.G. Ballard

Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner. — Aldous Huxley

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them. — Aldous Huxley

they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable? "Of — Aldous Huxley

That which had made Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being himself and all alone was too much ability. What the two men shared was the knowledge that they were individuals. But whereas the physically defective Bernard had suffered all his life from the consciousness of being separate, it was only quite recently that, grown aware of his mental excess, Helmholtz Watson had also become aware of his difference from the people who surrounded him. This Escalator-Squash champion, this indefatigable lover (it was said that he had had six hundred and forty different girls in under four years), this admirable committee man and best mixer had realized quite suddenly that sport, women, communal activities were only, so far as he was concerned, second bests. Really, and at the bottom, he was interested in something else. But in what? In what? — Aldous Huxley

All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last. — Aldous Huxley

But men are not content merely desire; they like to have a logical or pseudo-logical justification for their desires; they like to believe that when they want something, it is not merely for their own personal advantage, but that their desires are dictated by pure reason, by nature, by God Himself. — Aldous Huxley

So in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages. But of course it's dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you couldn't get back, out of the chaos ... — Aldous Huxley

Linda was dying in company - in company and with all modern conveniences. — Aldous Huxley

I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly. — Aldous Huxley

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself. — Aldous Huxley

I have always been, am, and propose to remain a mere scholar. All that I have ever proposed to myself is to say, this and this I have learned; thus and thus have I learned it; go thou and learn better; but do not thrust on my shoulders the responsibility for your own laziness if you elect to take, on my authority, conclusions the value of which you ought to have tested for yourself. — Thomas Huxley

I fell," he repeated for the hundredth time.
"But you didn't fall very far," Mary Sarojini now said.
"No, I didn't fall very far," he agreed.
"So what's all the fuss about?" the child inquired. — Aldous Huxley

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. — Aldous Huxley

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail. — Aldous Huxley

Mr. [Aldous] Huxley has been the alarming young man for a long time, a sort of perpetual clever nephew who can be relied on to flutter the lunch party. Whatever will he say next? How does he think of those things? He has been deplored once or twice, but feeling is in his favor: he is steadily read. He is at once the truly clever person and the stupid person's idea of the clever person; he is expected to be relentless, to administer intellectual shocks. — Elizabeth Bowen