Aldous Huxley Quotes
Brave New World Quotes by Aldous Huxley
- Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. – Aldous Huxley
- Ending is better than mending. – Aldous Huxley
- Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. – Aldous Huxley
- I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. – Aldous Huxley
- “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.” If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely. – Aldous Huxley
- If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely. – Aldous Huxley
- I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly. – Aldous Huxley
- One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. – Aldous Huxley quote about belief.
- I am I, and I wish I weren’t. – Aldous Huxley
- “Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.” – Aldous Huxley
- I like being myself. Myself and nasty. – Aldous Huxley
- “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
- “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
- “Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.”
- “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.” – Aldous Huxley
- “De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.” – Aldous Huxley
- “The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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
Aldous Huxley Quotes About God
- “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.” – Aldous Huxley
- “All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.” – Aldous Huxley
- “There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.” – Aldous Huxley
Famous Aldous Huxley Quotes
- “Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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.” – Aldous Huxley
- “The vast majority of human being’s 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.” – Aldous Huxley
- “If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.” – Aldous Huxley
- “There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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.” – Aldous Huxley
- “An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.” – Aldous Huxley
- “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.” – Aldous Huxley
- “The proper study of mankind is books.” – Aldous Huxley
- “The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love – almost as violent and much more mischievous.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Dream in a pragmatic way.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Several excuses are always less convincing than one.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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.” – Aldous Huxley
- “That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Your true traveler 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
- “A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.” – Aldous Huxley
- “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.”
- “Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Experience teaches only the teachable.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Every man’s memory is his private literature.” – Aldous Huxley
- “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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.” – Aldous Huxley
- “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.” – Aldous Huxley
- “We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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
- “Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.” – Aldous Huxley
- “A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.” – Aldous Huxley
- “My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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.” – Aldous Huxley
- Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. – Aldous Huxley
- After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. – Aldous Huxley
- I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. – Aldous Huxley
- An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex. – Aldous Huxley
- That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach. – Aldous Huxley
- The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm. – Aldous Huxley
- Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. – Aldous Huxley
- All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. – Aldous Huxley
- Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. – Aldous Huxley
- …most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. – Aldous Huxley
- There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self. – Aldous Huxley
- There is no social stability without individual stability. – Aldous Huxley
- Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity. – Aldous Huxley
- I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then,” he added in a lower tone, “I ate my own wickedness. – Aldous Huxley
- The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. – Aldous Huxley
- For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. – Aldous Huxley
- …reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays…. – Aldous Huxley
- I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery. – Aldous Huxley
- To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs. – Aldous Huxley
- Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backward. – Aldous Huxley
- There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same, they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol. – Aldous Huxley
- One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies. – Aldous Huxley
- We are all geniuses up to the age of ten. – Aldous Huxley
- Liberties aren’t given, they are taken. – Aldous Huxley
- A love of nature keeps no factories busy. – Aldous Huxley
- It is natural to believe in God when you’re alone– quite alone, in the night, thinking about death. – Aldous Huxley
- We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves; we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. – Aldous Huxley
- Pain was a fascinating horror. – Aldous Huxley
- It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other. – Aldous Huxley
- The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace, the prurient ape’s defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much. – Aldous Huxley
- 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
- …two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary. – Aldous Huxley
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
- Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can’t. – Aldous Huxley
- The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense. – Aldous Huxley
- A man can smile and smile and be a villain. – Aldous Huxley
- But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from the outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind. – Aldous Huxley
- When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them. – Aldous Huxley
- The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred. – Aldous Huxley
- Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today. – Aldous Huxley
- We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. – Aldous Huxley
- Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement. – Aldous Huxley
- It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled. – Aldous Huxley
- I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both. – Aldous Huxley
- The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is… – Aldous Huxley
- Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking. – Aldous Huxley
- I’m claiming the right to be unhappy. – Aldous Huxley
- We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves. – Aldous Huxley
- Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma. – Aldous Huxley
- Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations. – Aldous Huxley
- What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you? – Aldous Huxley
- Those who meant well-behaved in the same way as those who meant badly. – Aldous Huxley
- Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too. – Aldous Huxley
- Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. – Aldous Huxley
- Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations. – Aldous Huxley
- Words form the thread on which we string our experiences. – Aldous Huxley
- I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world. – Aldous Huxley
- We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence. – Aldous Huxley
- The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above. – Aldous Huxley
- 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
- These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves. – Aldous Huxley
- Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books. – Aldous Huxley
- Can you say something about nothing? – Aldous Huxley
- The worst enemy of life, freedom, and common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency. – Aldous Huxley
- 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
- People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are. – Aldous Huxley
- Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation. – Aldous Huxley
- 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. – Aldous Huxley
- A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it. – Aldous Huxley
- Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness. – Aldous Huxley
- 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. – Aldous Huxley
- 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. – Aldous Huxley
- 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. – Aldous Huxley
- Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors. – Aldous Huxley
- Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know. – Aldous Huxley
- Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them. – Aldous Huxley
- Chastity – the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions. – Aldous Huxley
- So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable. – Aldous Huxley
- The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name. – Aldous Huxley
- It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels. – Aldous Huxley
- Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power. Ald– Aldous Huxley
- There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness. – Aldous Huxley
- 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
- Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something. – Aldous Huxley
- 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. – Aldous Huxley
- The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved. – Aldous Huxley
- 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. – Aldous Huxley
- What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera. – Aldous Huxley
- 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. – Aldous Huxley
- 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. – Aldous Huxley
- Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work. – Aldous Huxley
- Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held. – Aldous Huxley
- 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. – Aldous Huxley
- Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, and neither can it forget. – Aldous Huxley
- Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage, the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning. – Aldous Huxley
- Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain. – Aldous Huxley
- Europe is so well-gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, or a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image. – Aldous Huxley
- Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself. – Aldous Huxley
Quick Facts About Aldous Huxley
- Aldous Huxley died on the same day as fellow author C. S. Lewis and President John F. Kennedy.
- Aldous Huxley gained a scholarship to Balliol College at Oxford University
- Aldous Huxley showed interest in mysticism.
- He married his first wife, Maria Nys in 1919 and they gave birth to their son named Mathew.
- Aldous Huxley married his second wife in 1956.
- Notable works by Aldous Huxley include The Genius and the Goddess, Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928), The Athenaeum, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and many more.
- Aldous Huxley’s net worth is about $11 MILLION as at this year.
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