Aldous Huxley Quotes

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.

Thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown.

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

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.

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.

It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live.

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

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?

Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.

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 .

I am I, and I wish I weren't.

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.

Real progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto.

Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.

Knowledge is porportionate to being... You know in virtue of what you are.

The lion will lay down with the lamb...but every morning they'll have to provide a new lamb. Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

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

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them.

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

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

Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.

Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

Champagne had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife.

In a few years, no doubt, marriage licences will be sold like dog licences, good for 12 months.

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.

If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.

One seventh of your life is spent on Monday.

Ending is better than mending.

...two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you.

Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.

A love of nature keeps no factories busy.

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

If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were.

You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

Intellectuals ... regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

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.

For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim's time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

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.

Somewhere in the rain, there will always be an abandoned dog that prevents you from being happy.

I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.