Top 686 Quotes & Sayings by Aldous Huxley

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English writer Aldous Huxley.
Last updated on December 14, 2024.
Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly 50 books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. — © Aldous Huxley
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
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.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
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.
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
Every man's memory is his private literature.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery. — © Aldous Huxley
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
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.
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
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.
Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
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 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.
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
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.'
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
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.
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are. — © Aldous Huxley
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
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.
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. — © Aldous Huxley
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
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.
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
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