He was widely considered to be one of the most intelligent and wide-ranging English writers of the twentieth century. Huxley symbolized a man in his restless curiosity.
He searched for meaning in a post-religious age and was concerned about the mistreatment of science and the future of the planet. He was also one of the most intriguing and complex figures of twentieth-century English writing.
His brain capacity was outstanding; he was a philosopher, novelist, poet, biographer, and a great social and political thinker. In his thinking, Huxley was never confined by conventional categories, concerned to communicate his insights in ordinary language. (1894-1963)
– Aldous Huxley Quotes –
Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
~ Aldous Huxley
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
~ Aldous Huxley
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
~ Aldous Huxley
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
~ Aldous Huxley
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
~ Aldous Huxley
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
~ Aldous Huxley
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
~ Aldous Huxley
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
~ Aldous Huxley
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
~ Aldous Huxley
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
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
~ Aldous Huxley
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
~ Aldous Huxley
There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
~ Aldous Huxley
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
~ Aldous Huxley
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
~ Aldous Huxley
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.
~ Aldous Huxley
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
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
~ Aldous Huxley
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
~ Aldous Huxley
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
~ Aldous Huxley
Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.
~ Aldous Huxley
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
~ Aldous Huxley
Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
~ Aldous Huxley
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
~ Aldous Huxley
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
~ Aldous Huxley
The proper study of mankind is books.
~ Aldous Huxley
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
~ Aldous Huxley
Every man’s memory is his private literature.
~ Aldous Huxley
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.
~ Aldous Huxley
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
~ Aldous Huxley
Every person who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make life full, significant, and interesting.
~ Aldous Huxley
If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
~ Aldous Huxley
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
~ Aldous Huxley
An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.
~ Aldous Huxley
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
~ Aldous Huxley
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
~ Aldous Huxley
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
~ Aldous Huxley
Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
~ Aldous Huxley
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
~ Aldous Huxley
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
~ Aldous Huxley
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.
~ Aldous Huxley
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
~ Aldous Huxley
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
~ Aldous Huxley
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
~ Aldous Huxley
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.
~ Aldous Huxley
Experience teaches only the teachable.
~ Aldous Huxley
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
~ Aldous Huxley
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
~ Aldous Huxley
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.
~ Aldous Huxley
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’
~ Aldous Huxley
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
~ Aldous Huxley
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
~ Aldous Huxley
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
~ Aldous Huxley
Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
~ Aldous Huxley
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
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
~ Aldous Huxley
Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
~ Aldous Huxley
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
~ Aldous Huxley
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
~ Aldous Huxley
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
~ Aldous Huxley
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
~ Aldous Huxley
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
~ Aldous Huxley
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.
~ Aldous Huxley
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
~ Aldous Huxley
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
~ Aldous Huxley
