“What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.”
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Thomas Henry Huxley 127
English biologist and comparative anatomist 1825–1895Related quotes
“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
Source: Middlemarch (1871)
The Deception: At the Masked Ball (p. 38)
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Phases in English Poetry (1928)
“How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.”
Source: Intimacy: das Buch zum Film von Patrice Chéreau
Preface
Problems In Genetics (1913)
Context: Few who are familiar with the facts that genetic research has revealed are now inclined to speculate as to the manner by which the process [species come into existence] has been accomplished. Our knowledge of the nature and properties of living things is far too meagre to justify any such attempts. Suggestions of course can be made: though, however, these ideas may have a stimulating value in the lecture room, they look weak and thin when set out in print.
“To the rational being only the irrational is unendurable, but the rational is endurable.”
Variant translation: To a reasonable creature, that alone is insupportable which is unreasonable; but everything reasonable may be supported.
Book I, ch. 2.
Discourses
1960s, The Drum Major Instinct (1968)
J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 211
The Humiliation of the Word (1981)