Aphorisms and Reflections from the works of T. H. HuxleyHuxley, Thomas Henry
Philosophy
Aphorisms and Reflections from the works of T. H. Huxley
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
No man ever understands Shakespeare until he is old, though the youngest
may admire him, the reason being that he satisfies the artistic instinct
of the youngest and harmonises with the ripest and richest experience of
the oldest.
XCIII
It is not a question whether one order of study or another should
predominate. It is a question of what topics of education you shall
select which will combine all the needful elements in such due
proportion as to give the greatest amount of food, support, and
encouragement to those faculties which enable us to appreciate truth,
and to profit by those sources of innocent happiness which are open to
us, and, at the same time, to avoid that which is bad, and coarse, and
ugly, and keep clear of the multitude of pitfalls and dangers which
beset those who break through the natural or moral laws.
XCIV
Writing is a form of drawing; therefore if you give the same attention
and trouble to drawing as you do to writing, depend upon it, there is
nobody who cannot be made to draw, more or less well.... I do not say
for one moment you would make an artistic draughtsman. Artists are not
made; they grow.... You can teach simple drawing, and you will find it
an implement of learning of extreme value. I do not think its value can
be exaggerated, because it gives you the means of training the young in
attention and accuracy, which are the two things in which all mankind
are more deficient than in any other mental quality whatever.
XCV
If a man cannot get literary culture of the highest kind out of his
Bible, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Hobbes, and Bishop
Berkeley, to mention only a few of our illustrious writers--I say, if he
cannot get it out of those writers, he cannot get it out of anything;
and I would assuredly devote a very large portion of the time of every
English child to the careful study of the models of English writing of
such varied and wonderful kind as we possess, and, what is still more
important and still more neglected, the habit of using that language
with precision, with force, and with art.
XCVI
I fancy we are almost the only nation in the world who seem to think
that composition comes by nature. The French attend to their own
language, the Germans study theirs; but Englishmen do not seem to think
it is worth their while.
XCVII
Many of the faults and mistakes of the ancient philosophers are
traceable to the fact that they knew no language but their own, and were
often led into confusing the symbol with the thought which it embodied.
XCVIII
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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