Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly fifty books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems. Profoundly inspirational Aldous Huxley quotes will encourage growth in life, make you wiser and broaden your perspective.
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Famous Aldous Huxley Quotes
Hitler’s vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording… Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
To be a fool at the right time is also an art.
Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
For the first time in the history of the world, Buddhism proclaimed a salvation which each individual could gain from him or herself, in this world, during this life, without any least reference to God, or to gods either great or small.
The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.
Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.
Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world’s most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.
On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart’s music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.
Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.
Amazing Aldous Huxley Quotes
Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.
The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.
If you don’t gamble, you’ll never win.
Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
Every man’s memory is his private literature.
If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were.
The third petition of the Lord’s Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone’s will be done but their own.
Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.
For 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
To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.
In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful, and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.
Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.
Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
All right then, said the Savage defiantly, I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.
Top Aldous Huxley Quotes
The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which love can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time.
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. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must be continuously on watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness.
War is often described as a law of nature-this is not true: Among the lower animals, war is unknown.
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Liberty? Why it doesn’t exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.
Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
Somewhere in the rain, there will always be an abandoned dog that prevents you from being happy.
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 vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful — if strenuously led — as Christian’s in The Pilgrim’s Progress.
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.
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.
Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma.
The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.
God isn’t the son of Memory; He’s the son of Immediate Experience. You can’t worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it’s hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you’ve got to die to every other moment.
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.
Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything, will really do.
Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.
If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
Real progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto.
Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.
Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction
To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.
All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant-sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.
Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body.
I’d rather be myself, he said. Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.
