Top 100 Quotes About Aldous Huxley
#1. At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.
Aldous Huxley
#3. 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
#4. Nothing could assuage the secular grief that was your heritage.
Aldous Huxley
#5. Happiness is like coke - something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.
Aldous Huxley
#6. 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
#7. 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
#9. 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
#10. Life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything
Aldous Huxley
#11. Faith may be relied upon to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation.
Aldous Huxley
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Science [is] that wonderfully convenient personification of the opinions, at a certain date, of Professors X, Y, and Z ...
Aldous Huxley
#17. This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.
Aldous Huxley
#18. 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
#19. She wasn't a real savage, had been hatched out of a bottle and conditioned like any one else:
Aldous Huxley
#20. Habit is as fatal to a sense of wrongdoing as to active enjoyment.
Aldous Huxley
#21. The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable
Aldous Huxley
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.
Aldous Huxley
#34. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.
Aldous Huxley
#35. Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education.
Aldous Huxley
#36. It is natural to believe in God when you're alone
quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.
Aldous Huxley
#37. 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
#38. I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Aldous Huxley
#40. 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
#41. Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I'm in a coma.
Aldous Huxley
#42. He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take.
Aldous Huxley
#43. If you want to get men to act reasonably, you must set about persuading them in a maniacal manner.
Aldous Huxley
#44. Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Aldous Huxley
#45. 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
#46. Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
Aldous Huxley
#47. Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
Aldous Huxley
#49. 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
#50. Henri IV's feet and armpits enjoyed an international reputation.
Aldous Huxley
#51. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. What fun it would be,' he thought, 'if one didn't have to think about happiness!' With
Aldous Huxley
#58. 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
#60. The snapshots had become almost as dim as memories.
Aldous Huxley
#61. 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
#62. Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.
Aldous Huxley
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley
#66. 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
#67. The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
Aldous Huxley
#68. 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
#69. A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.
Aldous Huxley
#70. The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.
Aldous Huxley
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
Aldous Huxley
#77. In his anxiety to be just to others he was often prepared to be unjust to himself. He was always ready to sacrifice his own rights rather than run any rish of infringing the rights of others.
Aldous Huxley
#78. Peace is a necessary condition of spirituality, no less than an inevitable result of it.
Aldous Huxley
#79. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.
Aldous Huxley
#80. It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.
Aldous Huxley
#81. True, Clara's eyebrows didn't meet. But she was really too pneumatic. Whereas Fifi and Joanna were absolutely right. Plump, blonde, not too large ... And it was that great lout, Tom Kawaguchi, who now took the seat between them.
Aldous Huxley
#82. Community, Identity, Stability." Grand words. "If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.
Aldous Huxley
#83. Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction
Aldous Huxley
#84. 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. Let us be
duly thankful for that, my dear Denis
duly thankful.
Aldous Huxley
#85. My first psychedelic experience with Aldous still directs my life today.
Laura Huxley
#86. The Quakers pray as the spirit moves them; but to let oneself be moved by the spirit is an arduous business. Kindlier and more worldly churches, with a feeling for human weakness, provide their worshipers with rituals, litanies, beads and prayer wheels.
Aldous Huxley
#87. To understand sympathetically, with one's whole beings, the state of mind of some one radically unlike oneself is very difficult - is, so far as I am concerned, impossible.
Aldous Huxley
#88. Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.
Aldous Huxley
#89. It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live. The fools, the innumerable fools, take it all for granted, skate about cheerfully on the surface and never think of inquiring what's underneath.
Aldous Huxley
#90. New ideas are reasonable if they can be fitted into an already familiar scheme, unreasonable if they cannot be made to fit. Our intellectual prejudices determine the channels along which our reason shall flow.
Aldous Huxley
#91. Marble, I perceive, covers a multitude of sins.
Aldous Huxley
#92. The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.
Aldous Huxley
#93. The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.
Aldous Huxley
#94. God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic.
Aldous Huxley
#95. A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
Aldous Huxley
#96. It is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters.
Aldous Huxley
#97. Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.
Aldous Huxley
#98. They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now"
"But God doesn't change"
"Men do though
Aldous Huxley
#99. After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
#100. Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation ...
Aldous Huxley
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