Aldous Huxley Quotes (238 Quotes)

I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...

Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all, or else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr Foster sighed and shook his head.

Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended--there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense.

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.

I like being myself. Myself and nasty.

Round and round they went with their snakes, snakily...

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

And do remember that a gramme is better than a damn.

I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.

Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east...

You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.

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.

If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum, I shall ask for your transference to a Sub-Centre-preferably to Iceland. Good morning.

The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to't with a more riotous appetite.

You can only be independent of God while you've got youth and prosperity; independence won't take you safely to the end.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

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.

I'm pretty good at inventing phrases you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good what you make with them ought to be good too. Training and instruction during sleep.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

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.

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.

Which is better to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds

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.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself As an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.

The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture-ground where all may graze, and where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, the sweeter is its flavor, and the more it nourishes.

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.

Compared with that of Taoists and Far Eastern Buddhists, the Christian attitude toward Nature has been curiously insensitive and often downright domineering and violent. Taking their cue from an unfortunate remark in Genesis, Catholic moralists have regarded animals as mere things which men do right to regard for their own ends....

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

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.

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.

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

Ignore death up to the last moment then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh

Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful -- if strenuously led -- as Christian's in The Pilgrim's Progress.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded it is supposed to be one-pointed -- a compass, not a weathercock.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.