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Quotes by Aldous Huxley


Facts do not cease to exist just because they are ignored.
– Aldous Huxley
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
– Aldous Huxley
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
– Aldous Huxley
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
– Aldous Huxley
A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.
– Aldous Huxley
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
– Aldous Huxley
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
– Aldous Huxley
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
– Aldous Huxley
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
– Aldous Huxley
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
– Aldous Huxley
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
– Aldous Huxley
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
– Aldous Huxley
Dream in a pragmatic way.
– Aldous Huxley
Every man's memory is his private literature.
– Aldous Huxley
Every person who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make life full, significant, and interesting.
– Aldous Huxley
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
– Aldous Huxley
Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.
– Aldous Huxley
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
– Aldous Huxley
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
– Aldous Huxley
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
– Aldous Huxley
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
– Aldous Huxley
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
– Aldous Huxley
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
– Aldous Huxley
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
– Aldous Huxley
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
– Aldous Huxley
Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful - if strenuously led - as Christian's in The Pilgrim's Progress.
– Aldous Huxley
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
– Aldous Huxley
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
– Aldous Huxley
No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife.
– Aldous Huxley
Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.
– Aldous Huxley
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
– Aldous Huxley
One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.
– Aldous Huxley
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
– Aldous Huxley
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
– Aldous Huxley
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
– Aldous Huxley
Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.
– Aldous Huxley
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
– Aldous Huxley
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
– Aldous Huxley
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
– Aldous Huxley
The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.
– Aldous Huxley
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
– Aldous Huxley
The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful - because the reproached self isn't abandoned; it remains intact.
– Aldous Huxley
The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.
– Aldous Huxley
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
– Aldous Huxley
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
– Aldous Huxley
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
– Aldous Huxley
The proper study of mankind is books.
– Aldous Huxley
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
– Aldous Huxley
The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.
– Aldous Huxley
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
– Aldous Huxley
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
– Aldous Huxley
There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
– Aldous Huxley
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
– Aldous Huxley
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
– Aldous Huxley
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
– Aldous Huxley
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
– Aldous Huxley
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
– Aldous Huxley
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
– Aldous Huxley
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
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
– Aldous Huxley
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
– Aldous Huxley
Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.
– Aldous Huxley
Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?
– Aldous Huxley
Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.
– Aldous Huxley
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
– Aldous Huxley
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
– Aldous Huxley
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 religous or political ideas.
– Aldous Huxley
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
– Aldous Huxley
That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
– Aldous Huxley
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
– Aldous Huxley
Death … It’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
– Aldous Huxley
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
– Aldous Huxley
You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
– Aldous Huxley
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
– 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
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
– Aldous Huxley
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
– Aldous Huxley
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
– Aldous Huxley
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
– Aldous Huxley
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
– Aldous Huxley
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
– Aldous Huxley
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
– Aldous Huxley
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
– Aldous Huxley
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
– Aldous Huxley
Science has explained nothing the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
– Aldous Huxley
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
– Aldous Huxley
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
– Aldous Huxley
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
– Aldous Huxley
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
– Aldous Huxley
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
– Aldous Huxley
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
– Aldous Huxley
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
– Aldous Huxley
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'
– Aldous Huxley
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
– Aldous Huxley
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
– Aldous Huxley
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
– Aldous Huxley
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
– Aldous Huxley
Experience teaches only the teachable.
– Aldous Huxley
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
– Aldous Huxley
Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
– Aldous Huxley