Aldous Huxley Quotes (238 Quotes)

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons that's philosophy.

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Morality is always the product of terror its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

The business of a seer is to see and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.

A large city cannot be experientially known its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

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.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

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.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

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.

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

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.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.

The thing that impresses me most about this country is its hopefulness. It is this which distinguishes it from Europe, where there is hopeless depression and fear.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

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?

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.

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

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.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat, when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife. No man has ever dared to proclaim his illicit amours so frankly as this same tom caterwauling on the tiles.

Rites, sacraments, and ceremonials are valuable to the extent that they remind those who take part in them of the true Nature of Things.

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of a great sculpture.

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.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

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.

Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.

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.

Genius is a child up to the age of ten.

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.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

I admit that mathematical science is a good thing. But excessive devotion to it is a bad thing.

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

The traveler's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be An actor as well as a spectator.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.