Famous Quotes By Aldous Huxley

 

1. A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
2. A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
3. A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
4. After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
5. All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
6. An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
7. Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
8. Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
9. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
10. Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
11. De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
12. Dream in a pragmatic way.
13. Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
14. 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.
15. Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
16. Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you.
17. Experience teaches only the teachable.
18. 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.
19. 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.
20. Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
21. Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
22. I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
23. Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
24. 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.'
25. It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
26. It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
27. Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
28. 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.
29. Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
30. Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
31. Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
32. 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.
33. People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
34. 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?
35. Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
36. Science has explained nothing the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
37. So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
38. Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
39. Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
40. Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
41. That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
42. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
43. 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.
44. 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.
45. The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
46. The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
47. 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.
48. The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
49. The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
50. The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
51. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
52. 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.
53. There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
54. Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
55. To his dog, every man is Napoleon hence the constant popularity of dogs.
56. To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
57. We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
58. 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.
59. What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
60. What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
61. 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.
62. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
63. 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.
64. Your true traveller 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.