Aldous Huxley Quotes

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1. 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.
2. 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.'
3. 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.
4. Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
8. An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
9. Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
10. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
11. Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
12. Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you.
13. Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
14. Experience teaches only the teachable.
15. 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.
16. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
17. Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
18. Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
19. Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
20. I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
21. Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
22. Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
23. Most human beings have an absolute and infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
24. Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
25. 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.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
29. So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
30. Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
31. That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
32. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
33. The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.
34. The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
35. The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
36. The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
37. The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
38. The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
39. There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
40. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
41. There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
42. To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
43. To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
44. We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
45. What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
46. 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.
47. Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.