Aldous Huxley's Quotes

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

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.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

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.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

The proper study of mankind is books.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

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.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

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.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

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.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

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.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

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.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

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.'