Top 100 Aldous Huxley Quotes
#1. At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.
Aldous Huxley
#2. Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
Aldous Huxley
#3. God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic.
Aldous Huxley
#4. There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
Aldous Huxley
#5. Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof - that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.
Aldous Huxley
#6. Twenty-two years eight months and four days from that moment, a promising young Alpha- Minus administrator at Mwanza-Mwanza was to die of trypanosomiasis - the first case for over half a century. Sighing, Lenina went on with her work.
Aldous Huxley
#7. To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Aldous Huxley
#8. Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
Aldous Huxley
#9. To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.
Aldous Huxley
#10. I wish they'd hurry up with the second scene,' said Mrs. Viveash. 'If there's anything that bores me, it's entr'actes.'
'Most of one's life is an entr'acte,' said Gumbril.
Aldous Huxley
#11. He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul.
Aldous Huxley
#12. That's what you men are always doing; it's so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire.
Aldous Huxley
#13. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.
Aldous Huxley
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
Aldous Huxley
#17. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably.
Aldous Huxley
#18. 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
#19. The impersonal forces of over-population and over-organization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system.
Aldous Huxley
#20. The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't with a more riotous appetite.
Aldous Huxley
#21. 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
#22. Nature is monstrously unjust. There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.
Aldous Huxley
#23. The individual," he began in a soft and sadly philosophical tone, "is not a self-supporting universe. There are times when he comes into contact with other individuals, when he is forced to take cognisance of the existence of other universes besides himself." He
Aldous Huxley
#24. So in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages. But of course it's dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you couldn't get back, out of the chaos ...
Aldous Huxley
#25. I had to depend on Braille for my reading and guide for my walking ... I am now wearing no glasses, reading and all without strain ... by taking lessons in seeing ... optometrists hate the method ...
Aldous Huxley
#26. And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue - liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.
Aldous Huxley
#27. In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem ...
Aldous Huxley
#28. It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
Aldous Huxley
#29. He had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop.
Aldous Huxley
#30. Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.
Aldous Huxley
#32. The form of institutions and philosophies may change; but the substance that underlies them remains indestructible, because the nature of humanity remains unaltered.
Aldous Huxley
#33. To know a person's character you must at least have talked with him, and unless you are gifted with remarkable intuitive insight you are not likely to know much about him unless you have seen him living and acting over a considerable period of time.
Aldous Huxley
#35. The poet's place, it seems to me, is with the Mr. Hydes of human nature.
Aldous Huxley
#36. A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they're fifty?
Aldous Huxley
#37. The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface .
Aldous Huxley
#38. In 1984 the lust for power is satisfied by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, by inflicting a hardly less humiliating pleasure.
Aldous Huxley
#39. Once, when I was grumbling over being obliged to eat meat and do no penance, I heard it said that sometimes there was more of self-love than desire of penance in such sorrow. St. Teresa
Aldous Huxley
#40. However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for.
Aldous Huxley
#41. Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.
Aldous Huxley
#42. If you're a human being, you'll be seeing something of both, because we've always wanted things both ways.
Aldous Huxley
#43. Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds-the given and the home-made, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols.
Aldous Huxley
#44. If only good intentions were enough to make good poetry!
Aldous Huxley
#46. Chaos and ineptitude are anti-human; but so too is a superlatively efficient government, equipped with all the products of a highly developed technology.
Aldous Huxley
#47. If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.
Aldous Huxley
#48. In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.
Aldous Huxley
#49. 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
#50. Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.
Aldous Huxley
#51. The religiously-minded dualist calls homemade spirits from the vasty deep; the nondualist calls the vasty deep into his spirit or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vasty deep is already there.
Aldous Huxley
#52. The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.
Aldous Huxley
#53. I'd rather entrust my daughters to Casanova than my secrets to a novelist. Literary fires are hotter even than sexual ones.
Aldous Huxley
#54. Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.
Aldous Huxley
#55. When we see a rose, we immediately say, rose. We do not say, I see a roundish mass of delicately shaded reds and pinks. We immediately pass from the actual experience to the concept.
Aldous Huxley
#56. In spiritual matters, knowledge is dependent upon being; as we are, so we know.
Aldous Huxley
#57. Fortunate boys!' said the Controller. 'No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy - to preserve you, so as far as that is possible, from having emotions at all.'
'Ford's in his flivver,' murmured the DHC. 'All's well with the world.
Aldous Huxley
#58. The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
Aldous Huxley
#59. When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.
Aldous Huxley
#60. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Aldous Huxley
#61. The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.
Aldous Huxley
#62. In itself, no doubt, the natural and moderate satisfaction of the sexual instinct is a matter quite indifferent to morality. It is only in relation to something else that the satisfaction of a natural instinct can be said to be good or bad.
Aldous Huxley
#64. Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.
Aldous Huxley
#65. Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Aldous Huxley
#66. Knowledge is porportionate to being ... You know in virtue of what you are.
Aldous Huxley
#67. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low.
Aldous Huxley
#68. Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.
Aldous Huxley
#69. Good is that which makes for unity. Evil is that which makes for separateness.
Aldous Huxley
#70. The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
Aldous Huxley
#71. It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.
Aldous Huxley
#72. Everybody wants power. Power in some form or other. [ ... ] Some people want power to persecute other human beings; you expend your lust for power in persecuting words, twisting them, molding them, torturing them to obey you.
Aldous Huxley
#73. The lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.
Aldous Huxley
#74. A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world
intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man..
Aldous Huxley
#75. And it's what you never will write," said the Controller. "Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if were new, it couldn't possibly be like Othello.
Aldous Huxley
#76. That's one of the disadvantages of getting older; you're inclined to make intimate contacts with fewer people.
Aldous Huxley
#77. Words are man's first and most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe;
Aldous Huxley
#78. Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.
Aldous Huxley
#81. Culture is like the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in any large united family and is the common property of all its members. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats.
Aldous Huxley
#82. Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!
Aldous Huxley
#84. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
Aldous Huxley
#85. The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.
Aldous Huxley
#86. There was a silence. In spite of their sadness - because of it, even; for their sadness was the symptom of their love for one another - the three young men were happy.
Aldous Huxley
#87. Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it.
Aldous Huxley
#88. Nothing like modern art for sterilizing the life out of things.
Aldous Huxley
#89. At the city gates a corpse or two hung, moldering, from the municipal gallows. Within the walls, there were the usual dirty streets, the customary gamut of smells, from wood smoke to excrement, from geese to incense, from baking bread to horses, swine and unwashed humanity. Peasants,
Aldous Huxley
#90. No man can concentrate his attention upon evil, or even upon the idea of evil, and remain unaffected. To be more against the devil than for God is exceedingly dangerous.
Aldous Huxley
#91. Craving for power is not a vice of the body, consequently it knows none of the limitations imposed by a tired or satiated physiology upon gluttony, intemperance and lust
Aldous Huxley
#92. Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions, it is walled and roofed with them.
Aldous Huxley
#93. And the present sheared asunder from the past, like an iceberg sheared off from its frozen parent cliffs, and went sailing out to sea in lonely pride. All the past ages had accomplished was as nothing.
Aldous Huxley
#94. I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.
Aldous Huxley
#95. Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers.
Aldous Huxley
#96. The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.
Aldous Huxley
#97. If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were.
Aldous Huxley
#98. But God doesn't change.'
'Men do, though.'
'What difference does that make?'
'All the difference in the world.
Aldous Huxley
#99. He had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular
Aldous Huxley
#100. It's an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-moron work - go mad, or start smashing things up.
Aldous Huxley
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