Aldous Huxley Quotes (238 Quotes)

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.

There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example.

Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.

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

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals it cannot be mass-produced.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

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.

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.

In the world of ideas everything was clear in life all was obscure, embroiled.

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

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

A poor degenerate from the ape, Whose hands are four, whose tails a limb, I contemplate my flaccid shape And know I may not rival him Save with my mind.

Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the ''higher life.''

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

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

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.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

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.'

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

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.

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

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

Real progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto.

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution -- then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.

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.

The word prayer is applied to at least four distinct procedures petition, intercession, adoration, and contemplation.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

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.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

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.

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.

The first questions to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievements, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End.

Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.

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.

Every person who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make life full, significant, and interesting.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

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

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

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.

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.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

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

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Facts are ventriloquists' dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom elsewhere they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer nonsense.

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.