Best Aldous Huxley Quotes

Facts don't cease to exist because they are ignored.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes --ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay -- in solid cash -- the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the higher life.

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.

Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.

People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

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

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

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

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.

The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

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

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.

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.

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.

Most ignorance is evincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

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.

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

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

I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

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.

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.

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution -- then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.

Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?

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.

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

Facts are ventriloquists 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.

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

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

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.

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

There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world's sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example.

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

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.

Industrial man --a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.