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Aldous Huxley

English writer; grandson of Thomas Huxley who is remembered mainly for his depiction of a scientifically controlled utopia (1894-1963)

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

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.

– Aldous Huxley

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A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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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 subltly and feel nobly.

– Aldous Huxley

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A country which proposes to make use of modern war as an instrument of policy must possess a highly centralized, all-powerful executive, hence the absurdity of talking about the defense of democracy by force of arms. A democracy which makes or effectively prepares for modern scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic.

– Aldous Huxley

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Classic 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

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

– Aldous Huxley

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Every man's memory is his private literature.

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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Experience teaches only the teachable.

– Aldous Huxley

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If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

– Aldous Huxley

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The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they posses a really effective system of mind-manipulation. Under a scientific dictator, education will really work with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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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.

– Aldous Huxley

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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

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

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.

– Aldous Huxley

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All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.

– Aldous Huxley

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Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.

– Aldous Huxley

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At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas.

– Aldous Huxley

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Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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Countless audiences soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open.

– Aldous Huxley

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Death Its the only thing we havent succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

– Aldous Huxley

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Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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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

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Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness it is generally the by-product of other activities.

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

– Aldous Huxley

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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

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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

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

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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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.

– Aldous Huxley

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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

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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.

– Aldous Huxley

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The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

– Aldous Huxley

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The only completely consistent people are the dead.

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. . .they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.

– Aldous Huxley

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The silent bear no witness against themselves.

– Aldous Huxley

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The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface.

– Aldous Huxley

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The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and madmen.

– Aldous Huxley

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There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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

– Aldous Huxley

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To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance - did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.

– Aldous Huxley

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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.

– Aldous Huxley

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We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

– Aldous Huxley

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When one's ill or unhappy, one needs something outside oneself to hold one up. It is a good thing, I think, when one has been knocked out of one's balance . to have some external job or duty to hang on to.

– Aldous Huxley

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Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.

– Aldous Huxley

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You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but now, as yet, intelligent enough.

– Aldous Huxley

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