Aldous Huxley Quotes & Sayings

The consistent thinker, the consistently moral man, is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac. — Aldous Huxley

I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning - the Christian meaning, they insisted - of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever. — Aldous Huxley

Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty ... Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows. No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets. No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas. And think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard! — Aldous Huxley

If you want to get men to act reasonably, you must set about persuading them in a maniacal manner. — Aldous Huxley

Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education. — Aldous Huxley

I'm not denying their kindness," said the Rani. "But after all kindness isn't the only virtue. — Aldous Huxley

The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies. — Aldous Huxley

If only good intentions were enough to make good poetry! — Aldous Huxley

The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced. — Aldous Huxley

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

Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents. — Aldous Huxley

It is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters. — Aldous Huxley

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look. — Aldous Huxley

He continued, slowly, by a process of osmosis and white knowledge (which is like white noise, only more useful), to comprehend the city, a process that accelerated when he realized that the actual City of London itself was no bigger than a square mile. — Aldous Huxley

Truth's a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it's been beneficent. — Aldous Huxley

That one should have to talk about the mind in metaphors is unfortunate, but inevitable. — Aldous Huxley

It's dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling ... — Aldous Huxley

What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. — Aldous Huxley

The scent organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio - rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and newmown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord - a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig's dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began. The final blast of thyme died away; there was a round of applause; the lights went up. — Aldous Huxley

We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look. — Aldous Huxley

Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation. — Aldous Huxley

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.
Faith is something very different from belief. Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul's words, Mohammed's words, Marx's words, Hitler's words
people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history
sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church's inquisitors and crusaders. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being. — Aldous Huxley

I mean what does a democracy depend on? A democracy depends on the individual voter making an intelligent and rational choice for what he regards as his enlightened self-interest, in any given circumstance. — Aldous Huxley

There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality. — Aldous Huxley

The scientific dictator of tomorrow will set up his whispering machines and subliminal projectors in schools and hospitals (children and the sick are highly suggestible), and in all public places where audiences can be given a preliminary softening up by suggestibility-increasing oratory or rituals. — Aldous Huxley

He had emerged from that crimson twilight into the common electric glare with a self-consciousness intensified to the pitch of agony. He was utterly miserable, and perhaps (her shining eyes accused him), perhaps it was his own fault. — Aldous Huxley

No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife. — Aldous Huxley

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body. — Aldous Huxley

THE LIFE THEORETIC W hile I have been fumbling over books And thinking about God and the Devil and all, Other young men have been battling with the days And others have been kissing the beautiful women. They have brazen faces like battering-rams. But I who think about books and such - I crumble to impotent dust before the struggling, And the women palsy me with fear. But when it comes to fumbling over books And thinking about God and the Devil and all, Why, there I am. But perhaps the battering-rams are in the right of it, Perhaps, perhaps ... God knows. — Aldous Huxley

It is not enough for the phrases to be good., what you make with them ought to be good too. — Aldous Huxley

Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems. — Aldous Huxley

The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator. — Aldous Huxley

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. — Aldous Huxley

But, then, you were born a pagan; I am trying laboriously to make myself one. I can take nothing for granted, I can enjoy nothing as it comes along. Beauty, pleasure, art, women - I have to invent an excuse, a justification for everything that's delightful. Otherwise I can't enjoy it with an easy conscience. — Aldous Huxley

Industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning. — Aldous Huxley

There was a silence. In spite of their sadness - because of it, even; for their sadness was the symptom of their love for one another - the three young men were happy. — Aldous Huxley

Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof - that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work. — Aldous Huxley

There aren't any lions in England," Lenina almost snapped.
"And even if there were," the Savage added, with sudden contemptuous resentment, "people would kill them out of helicopters, I suppose, with poison gas or something. — Aldous Huxley

Nothing could assuage the secular grief that was your heritage. — Aldous Huxley

Cynical realism - it's the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation — Aldous Huxley

Power and wealth increase in direct proportion to a man's distance from the material objects from which wealth and power are ultimately derived. — Aldous Huxley

Reuben was the child of Polish-speaking parents.' The Director interrupted himself. 'You know what Polish is, I suppose?' 'A dead language. — Aldous Huxley

Liberty? Why it doesn't exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages. — Aldous Huxley

Given a fair chance, human beings can govern themselves, and govern themselves better — Aldous Huxley

The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried. — Aldous Huxley

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. — Aldous Huxley

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

No social stability without individual stability. — Aldous Huxley

Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's — Aldous Huxley

Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them. — Aldous Huxley

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand - but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted. — Aldous Huxley

Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions. — Aldous Huxley

As though you could use violent, unjust means and achieve peace and justice! Means determine ends; and must be like the ends proposed. Means intrinsically different from the ends proposed achieve ends like themselves, not like those they were meant to achieve. — Aldous Huxley

Silence, silence.' All the air of the fourteenth floor was sibilant with the categorical imperative. Fifty — Aldous Huxley

Twenty-two years eight months and four days from that moment, a promising young Alpha- Minus administrator at Mwanza-Mwanza was to die of trypanosomiasis - the first case for over half a century. Sighing, Lenina went on with her work. — Aldous Huxley

Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education. — Aldous Huxley

At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men. — Aldous Huxley

Was and will make me ill,
I take a gram and only am. — Aldous Huxley

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

God in the safe and Ford on the shelves. — Aldous Huxley

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. — Aldous Huxley

Ford's in his flivver; all's well with the world. — Aldous Huxley

Great truths do not take hold of the hearts of the masses. And now, as all the world is in error, how shall I, though I know the true path, how shall I guide? If I know that I cannot succeed and yet try to force success, this would be but another source of error. Better then to desist and strive no more. But if I do not strive, who will? Chuang Tzu — Aldous Huxley

The silence of the storm weighs heavily
On their strained spirits: sometimes one will say
Some trivial thing as though to ward away
Mysterious powers, that imminently lie
In wait, with the strong exorcising grace
Of everyday's futility. Desire
Becomes upon a sudden a crystal fire,
Defined and hard: If he could kiss her face,
Could kiss her hair! As if by chance, her hand
Brushes on his ... Ah, can she understand?
Or is she pedestalled above the touch
Of his desire? He wonders: dare he seek
From her that little, that infinitely much?
And suddenly she kissed him on the cheek. — Aldous Huxley

Religious beliefs and practices are certainly not the only factors determining the behaviour of a given society. But, no less certainly, they are among the determining factors. At least to some extent, the collective conduct of a nation is a test of the religion prevailing within it, a criterion by which we may legitimately judge the doctrinal validity of that religion and its practical efficiency in helping individuals to advance towards the goal of human existence. — Aldous Huxley

This is not drawing,' he cried, 'this is inspiration!' 'I had meant it to be drawing,' was Constable's characteristic answer. — Aldous Huxley

Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of each of us would some day depend upon our winning or losing a game of chess. Do you not think that we should all consider it to be our primary duty to learn at least the names of the pieces and how to position them on the chessboard? — 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

Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction. — Aldous Huxley

For now there is only the darkness expanding and deepening, deepening into light; there is only this final peace, this consciousness of being no more separate, this illumination . . . — Aldous Huxley

At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction. — Aldous Huxley

Even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes even science. — Aldous Huxley

Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference. — Aldous Huxley

All democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one person or small group have too much power for too long a time — Aldous Huxley

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

Men have always been a prey to distractions, which arethe original sins of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. 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 — Aldous Huxley

I've never discussed my writing with others much, but I don't believe it can do any harm. I don't think that there's any risk that ideas or materials will evaporate. — Aldous Huxley

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 — Aldous Huxley

they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable? "Of — Aldous Huxley

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. — Aldous Huxley

Chaos and ineptitude are anti-human; but so too is a superlatively efficient government, equipped with all the products of a highly developed technology. — Aldous Huxley

Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly. — Aldous Huxley

The fact that extremely diversified phenomena are explained in terms of laws having the same form or pattern gives us information... about the structure of the various levels of reality with which the mind deals; for presumably the pattern of a hypothesis must have some correspondence, if it works, with the pattern of the phenomena which it explains. — Aldous Huxley

They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. — Aldous Huxley

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

Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of the newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights ... and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many. — Aldous Huxley

Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species. — Aldous Huxley

The firelight touches and transfigures her face, and we see, concretely illustrated, the impossible paradox and supreme truth - that perception is (or at least can be, ought to be) the same as Revelation, that Reality shines out of every appearance, that the One is totally, infinitely present in all particulars. — Aldous Huxley

Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual. — Aldous Huxley

The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms. — Aldous Huxley

The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved. — Aldous Huxley

If you're always scared of dying," Obispo had said, "you'll surely die. Fear's a poison; and not such a slow poison either. — Aldous Huxley

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. — Aldous Huxley

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

This concern with the basic condition of freedom
the absence of physical constraint
is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free
to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act. — 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

Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers. — Aldous Huxley

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 — Aldous Huxley

Ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit. — Aldous Huxley

At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively distance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. 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. — Aldous Huxley