Top 100 Huxley Quotes
#1. At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.
Aldous Huxley
#3. Academics and scientists too easily enjoy the role of secular priesthood given them in the nineteenth century by T. H. Huxley in particular.
Simon James
#4. The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious it makes little or no difference.
Aldous Huxley
#5. Nothing could assuage the secular grief that was your heritage.
Aldous Huxley
#6. Happiness is like coke - something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.
Aldous Huxley
#7. Bottle of mine, it's you I've always wanted!
Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?
Skies are blue inside of you,
The weather's always fine;
For
There ain't no Bottle in all the world
Like that dear little Bottle of mine.
Aldous Huxley
#8. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively distance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
Aldous Huxley
#10. You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of yourminds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.
Thomas Huxley
#11. Seated upon the convex mound Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays And sings his canticles and hymns, Making the hollow vault resound God's goodness and mysterious ways, Till the great fish spouts music as he swims.
Aldous Huxley
#12. Life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything
Aldous Huxley
#13. Faith may be relied upon to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation.
Aldous Huxley
#14. 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.
Aldous Huxley
#15. We can always be sure of one thing - that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.
Christopher Hitchens
#16. Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them ( ... ) you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education.
Aldous Huxley
#17. Punctured, utterly deflated, he dropped into a chair and, covering his face with his hands, began to weep. A few minutes later, however, he thought better of it and took four tablets of soma.
Upstairs in his room the Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet.
Aldous Huxley
#18. Science [is] that wonderfully convenient personification of the opinions, at a certain date, of Professors X, Y, and Z ...
Aldous Huxley
#19. This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.
Aldous Huxley
#20. Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.
Aldous Huxley
#21. She wasn't a real savage, had been hatched out of a bottle and conditioned like any one else:
Aldous Huxley
#22. Habit is as fatal to a sense of wrongdoing as to active enjoyment.
Aldous Huxley
#23. The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable
Aldous Huxley
#24. Oh devil! truth is better than much profit. I have searched over the grounds of my belief, and if wife and child and name and fame were all to be lost to me one after the other as the penalty, still I will not lie.
Thomas Huxley
#25. If you're always scared of dying," Obispo had said, "you'll surely die. Fear's a poison; and not such a slow poison either.
Aldous Huxley
#26. If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather's a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military.
Aldous Huxley
#27. But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.
Aldous Huxley
#28. 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.
Aldous Huxley
#29. To those who think that liberty is a good thing, and that it may someday be possible for people to live in a society fit for free, fully human individuals, a thorough education in the nature of language, its uses and abuses, seems indispensable.
Aldous Huxley
#30. Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demonstrations of these philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove that there is no God.
Thomas Huxley
#31. I did not feel drawn to huxley. He was beautiful physically but again without vibrations or sensory antennae ... and I had a painful impression of a psychic blindness. With all his science and knowledge, in the mystic world he blundered.
Anais Nin
#32. I am content with nothing, restless and ambitious ... and I despise myself for the vanity, which formed half the stimulus to my exertions. Oh would that I were one of those plodding wise fools who having once set their hand to the plough go on nothing doubting.
Thomas Huxley
#33. Bernard was duly grateful (it was an enormous comfort to have his friend again) and also duly resentful (it would be pleasure to take some revenge on Helmholtz for his generosity).
Aldous Huxley
#34. History is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma
Aldous Huxley
#36. To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect.
Aldous Huxley
#37. And whatever troubled him and showed in his face might have been the same old trouble - the problem of occupying space in the world and having a name people could call you by, being somebody they thought they could know
Aldous Huxley
#38. Asceticism, it is evident, has a double motivation. If men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments; it is also because they long to visit the mind's antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing.
Aldous Huxley
#39. Within the last fifty years, the extraordinary growth of every department of physical science has spread among us mental food of so nutritious and stimulating a character that a new ecdysis seems imminent.
Thomas Huxley
#40. Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.
Aldous Huxley
#41. It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organization upon the natural organization of the body.
Thomas Huxley
#42. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.
Aldous Huxley
#43. Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education.
Aldous Huxley
#44. It is natural to believe in God when you're alone
quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.
Aldous Huxley
#45. The clergy are at present divided into three sections: an immense body who are ignorant; a small proportion who know and are silent; and a minute minority who know and speak according to their knowledge.
Thomas Huxley
#46. 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.
Aldous Huxley
#47. When the present stung her, she sought her antidote in the future, which was as sure to hold achievement as the dying flower to hold the fruit when its petals wither.
Elspeth Huxley
#48. I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Aldous Huxley
#49. I take it that the good of mankind means the attainment, by every man, of all the happiness which he can enjoy without diminishing the happiness of his fellow men.
Thomas Huxley
#51. All democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one person or small group have too much power for too long a time
Aldous Huxley
#52. Some experience of popular lecturing had convinced me that the necessity of making things plain to uninstructed people, was one of the very best means of clearing up the obscure corners in one's own mind.
Thomas Huxley
#53. Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I'm in a coma.
Aldous Huxley
#54. Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing.
Thomas Huxley
#55. He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take.
Aldous Huxley
#56. If you want to get men to act reasonably, you must set about persuading them in a maniacal manner.
Aldous Huxley
#57. Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Aldous Huxley
#58. They passed a bed of opium poppies, dispetaled now; the round, ripe seedheads were brown and dry - like Polynesian trophies, Denis thought; severed heads stuck on poles.
Aldous Huxley
#59. Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
Aldous Huxley
#60. Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
Aldous Huxley
#62. At ordinary times, then, we are perfectly certain that men are not equal. But when, in a democratic country, we think or act politically we are no less certain that men are equal. Or at any rate - which comes to the same thing in practice - we behave as though we were certain of men's equality.
Aldous Huxley
#63. Henri IV's feet and armpits enjoyed an international reputation.
Aldous Huxley
#64. And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else
Aldous Huxley
#67. Wherever a choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory - reason.
Aldous Huxley
#68. We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?
Aldous Huxley
#69. To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
Aldous Huxley
#70. What fun it would be,' he thought, 'if one didn't have to think about happiness!' With
Aldous Huxley
#71. She spoke under her breath to Nick. "Is there a reason he's only wearing one sock?" "He puked on his foot." "Oh." She turned back to Huxley. "Can we get you another sock? Maybe a blanket or something?
Julie James
#72. That's why," he said speaking with averted face, "I wanted to do something first. I mean, to show I was worthy of you. Not that I could ever really be that. But at any rate to show I wasn't absolutely un-worthy. I wanted to do something.
Aldous Huxley
#74. It seems safe to look forward to the time when the conception of attractive and repulsive forces, having served its purpose as a useful piece of scientific scaffolding, will be replaced by the deduction of the phenomena known as attraction and repulsion, from the general laws of motion.
Thomas Huxley
#75. The snapshots had become almost as dim as memories.
Aldous Huxley
#76. Rome is the one great spiritual organisation which is able to resist and must, as a matter of life and death, the progress of science and modern civilization
Thomas Huxley
#77. Man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to intuitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.
Aldous Huxley
#78. Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.
Aldous Huxley
#79. The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.
Thomas Huxley
#80. Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.
Aldous Huxley
#81. The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.
Thomas Huxley
#82. I feel part of the environment, not separate from it, as though I'm at home rather than visiting - as though I'm tapped into some eternal omnipresence beyond the transient physical forms.
Michael Sanders
#83. The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley
#84. Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.
Aldous Huxley
#85. It is not who is right, but what is right, that is of importance.
Thomas Huxley
#86. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
Neil Postman
#87. The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
Aldous Huxley
#88. So now you can let go, my darling ... Let go ... Let go of this poor old body. You don't need it anymore. Let it fall away from you. Leave it lying there like a pile of worn-out clothes ... Go on, my darling, go on into the Light, into the peace, into the living peace of the Clear Light.
Aldous Huxley
#89. In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.
Thomas Huxley
#90. Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was that real religion, that emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty, could flourish in the absence of an idolatrous theology.
Adrian Desmond
#91. A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.
Aldous Huxley
#92. The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.
Aldous Huxley
#93. Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a "medium" hired at a guinea a seance.
Thomas Huxley
#94. I know these are going to sound like school reading-list suggestions, but if you like dystopian fiction, you should check out some of the originals: 'Anthem,' by Ayn Rand; '1984,' by George Orwell; or 'Brave New World,' by Aldous Huxley.
Sara Shepard
#95. How stupid of me not to have thought of it! T. H. Huxley cried upon reading On the Origin of Species. It is a view that has been echoed ever since. Interestingly,
Bill Bryson
#96. To use the intelligence in any other than the habitual way is not to use the intelligence; it is to be irrational, to rave like a madman.
Aldous Huxley
#97. Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say 'no' to the boss. But a man cannot say 'no' to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss's favour has been withdrawn.
Aldous Huxley
#98. Lord Edward took a scientific interest in the sexual activities of axolotls and chickens, guinea pigs and frogs; but any reference to the corresponding activities of humans made him painfully uncomfortable.
Aldous Huxley
#99. The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.
Aldous Huxley
#100. If the perpetual oscillation of nations between anarchy and despotism is to be replaced by the steady march of self-restraining freedom, it will be because men will gradually bring themselves to deal with political, as they now deal with scientific questions.
Thomas Huxley
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