Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Aldous Huxley. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly 50 books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with an undergraduate degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death.
By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism and universalism, addressing these subjects with works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945)—which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism—and The Doors of Perception (1954)—which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his vision of dystopia and utopia, respectively.
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 .
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.
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.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self.
Longer Version:
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.
We need grace in order to be able to live in such a way as to qualify ourselves to receive grace.
The daily bread of grace, without which nothing can be achieved, is given to the extent to which we ourselves give and forgive.
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.
Most human beings have an infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
There is no bad day that can't be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet. This is just truth, plain and simple.
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.
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.
Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom.
Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.
In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.
I'm not denying their kindness, said the Rani. But after all kindness isn't the only virtue.
Somewhere in the rain, there will always be an abandoned dog that prevents you from being happy.
We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
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.
Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.
The negative propaganda of silence is probably more effective as an instrument of persuasion and mental regimentation than speech. Silence creates the condition in which such words as are spoken or written take most effect.
By making harmless chemical euphoria freely available, a dictator could reconcile an entire population to a state of affairs to which self-respecting human beings ought not to be reconciled.
The moral is plain. Avoid, if possible, being bored yourself or boring others.
Extremes,' said the Controller, 'meet. For the good reason that they were made to meet.
The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun -- bang it goes.
Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.'' ... To be a perfect animal and a perfect human -- that was the ideal.
An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.
Even the best cookery book is no substitute for even the worst dinner.
Life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything.
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.
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.
He had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop.
In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don't exist. I am just a Vox et preaterea nihil.
People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!
The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve-endings and his cleverness won't allow it.
Longer Version:
Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power..
The mystical experience is doubly valuable; it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less self-centered and more creative life.
A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before they're fifty?
Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society.
They passed a bed of opium poppies, dispetaled now; the round, ripe seedheads were brown and dry -- like Polynesian trophies, Denis thought; severed heads stuck on poles.
Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.
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?
Preaching is an art, and in this, as in all other arts, the bad performers far outnumber the good.
Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.
The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.
Pully, hauly, tug with a will; the gods wiggle waggle, but the sky stands still.
Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!
Did you eat something that didn't agree with you? asked Bernard. The Savage nodded I ate civilization.
A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world -- intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.
A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable.
It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical. Profound and beautiful truth!
When public executions were abolished, it was not because the majority desired their abolition; it was because a small minority of exceptionally sensitive reformers possessed sufficient influence to have them banned.
People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is -- just be a little kinder.
Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; but without intelligence, ... love is impotent and freedom unattainable.
Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study.
To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.
But the nature of the universe is such that the ends never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
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.
He would have liked to behave well, but he did not know how to stop behaving badly.
Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.
Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.
I had to depend on Braille for my reading and guide for my walking...I am now wearing no glasses, reading and all without strain...by taking lessons in seeing...optometrists hate the method.
Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible. On the contrary, though I remain no less sadly certain than in the past that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it can be achieved and would like to see more of it.
The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much.
But wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way.
Wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopaedia.
Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.
Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system.
Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.
The ductless glands secrete among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life.
Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.
In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.
The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable.
Dedicated to all those who say: I don't have time for analytics or I don't understand analytics.
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.
It had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife. (Sebastian Barnack assessing a Roederer 1916 champagne in Time Must Have a Stop).
People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.
Longer Version:
People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God." (p.207).
Quotes by Aldous Huxley are featured in:
Happiness Quotes
History Quotes
Justice Quotes
Silence Quotes
Happy Quotes
Nirvana Quotes
Dog Quotes