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
That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained
in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with
ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of;
whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of
equal strength and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine,
to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as
force the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge
of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her
operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire,
but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the
servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty,
whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others
as himself.
XC
The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of
mankind, is wisdom.
XCI
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.
XCII
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 five 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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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