Aldous Huxley Quotes
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves.
Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.
The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.
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.
...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.
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.
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
Dinted dimpled wimpled-his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.
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.
Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom.
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.
If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.
Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.
"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.
Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
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.
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.
Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!
In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.
Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument.
Happiness is like coke — something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.
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.
To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
