Aldous Huxley Quotes
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone.
The greatest tragedy in human existence is the illusion of separateness.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individuals are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
The greatest tragedy in human existence is the illusion of separateness.
It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.
Chastity – the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see.
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal.
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.
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
All idealization makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity—it is to destroy it.
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.
The author’s obscurity is a horror to himself, his family, his friends, and his publishers.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
The sweater of the future will be as aesthetic as the sweater of the present, with the important addition of built-in automatic climate control.
It is only by remembering the past that we can halt the processes of change.
It is the typical fate of a modern scientific truth to begin as an heresy, proceed to be an orthodoxy, and to end as a superstititon.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance.
What is important is not what reality is, but what it will become.
The central ethical problem is that of living beautifully.
Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
One of the conditions of passionate peace is the capacity to be in darkness and chaos without fear.
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.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Almost all the books of quotations are on the one hand trite and on the other rather ill-natured.
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 religious or political idols.
I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
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 not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.