Aldous Huxley Quotes (238 Quotes)

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

Cant is always rather nauseating but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.

The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.

Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Modern man no longer regards Nature as being in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.

Seated upon the convex mound Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays And sings his canticles and hymns, Making the hollow vault resound Gods goodness and mysterious ways, Till the great fish spouts music as he swims.

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

The vast majority of human beings 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.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

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.

People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly

Industrial man --a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

The proper study of mankind is books.

It is far easier to write ten passable effective sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.

Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer.

Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.

The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful --because the reproached self isn't abandoned it remains intact.

I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something important to say and the power to say it only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.

So long as men worship dictators, Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

The smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

Blood of the world, time staunchless flows The wound is mortal and is mine.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.

Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.