Aldous Huxley Quotes
Most popular Aldous Huxley Quotes
Let us be kinder to one another.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Love, the last defense against old age.
Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
The silent bear no witness against themselves.
The only completely consistent people are dead.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
A chip on the shoulder is a sure sign of wood higher up.
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
Practically all of us are capable of practically anything.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the popularity of dogs.
Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms.
The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone.
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
Science is the only way we have of shoving truth down the reluctant throat.
A chip on the shoulder is a sure indication that there is more wood higher up.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentleman drape over their will to power.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
The function of language is twofold: to communicate emotion and to give information.
The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
Other people can't make you see with their eyes. At best they can only encourage you to use your own.
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates for a secret doubt.
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
No success is worthy of the name unless it is won by honest industry and brave breasting of the waves of fortune.
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
Great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!
The reason we like precious jewels so much is they remind us of planes of consciousness we've lived on, where those are the pebbles.
Technological advance is rapid. But without progress in charity, technological advance is useless. Indeed, it is worse than useless.
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.
How orderly philosophical is the landscape, are all the inhabitants of this World! It is the creation of a god who 'ever plays the geometer.'
Each man's memory is his private literature, and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.
Facts are ventriloquist's dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere they say nothing, or talk nonsense.
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.
Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and the more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.
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.
I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement.
If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay—in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
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.
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 rumour.
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 religious or political idols.
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet.
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.
Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze, morphia, and drugs: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the 'higher life.'
Industrialization is essentially the systematic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases what we extol as progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation. Such prosperity as we have used up to the present day is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.
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.
Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the "higher life."