Quotes by Aldous Huxley (Page 3 of 3)

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what's going on in his heart and mind.

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 trouble with fiction, said John Rivers, is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

And that, put in the Director sententiously, that is the secret of happiness and virtue -- liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.

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.

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.

I am entirely on the side of mystery. I mean, any attempt to explain away the mystery is ridiculous. I believe in the profound and unfathomable mystery of life which has a sort of divine quality about it.

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.

Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.

Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

When life appears to be working against you, when your luck is down, when the supposedly wrong people show up, or when you slip up and return to old, self-defeating habits, recognize the signs that you're out of harmony with intention.

I like being myself. Myself and nasty.

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum, I shall ask for your transference to a Sub-Centre -- preferably to Iceland. Good morning.

A man can smile and smile and be a villain.

I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.

I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation -- the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

One seventh of your life is spent on Monday.

Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, 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.

It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.

For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.

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

To change a vocabulary is easy; to change external circumstances or our own ingrained habits is hard and tiresome.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.

It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with I, me, mine, that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty -- his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

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.

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.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

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

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

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

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

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.

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

The proper study of mankind is books.

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.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

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.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

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

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.

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.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

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.

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

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

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.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

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.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.

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.'

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

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

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

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

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.

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.