Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
Thomas Huxley
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.
It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.
The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.
Learn what is true in order to do what is right.
Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.
Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.
Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation.
Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.
If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
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, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.
Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.
Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.
Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.
Economy does not lie in sparing money, but in spending it wisely.
The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and of the oppressed.
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
It is the customary fate of new truths, to begin as heresies, and to end as superstitions.
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.
There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.
The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.
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.
No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.
It is one of the most saddening things in life that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy.
Freedom and order are not incompatible... truth is strength... free discussion is the very life of truth.
All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified.
The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.
The great thing in the world is not so much to seek happiness as to earn peace and self-respect.
Misery is a match that never goes out.
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.
Proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother.
In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.
Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth.
I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and would up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer.
The doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction.
The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.
It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.
The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.
Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.
If a man cannot do brain work without stimulants of any kind, he had better turn to hand work it is an indication on Nature's part that she did not mean him to be a head worker.
The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
Teach a child what is wise, that is morality. Teach him what is wise and beautiful, that is religion!
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.
The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge.
The best men of the best epochs are simply those who make the fewest blunders and commit the fewest sins.
