Top 686 Quotes & Sayings by Aldous Huxley - Page 2

The proper study of mankind is books.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

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

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.

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

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

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.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

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.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

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.

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

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

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

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

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.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country´s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of W. Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by few.

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.

People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is - just be a little kinder.

Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

It's dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling.

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.

The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species.

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.