Aldous Huxley Quotes

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

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

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.

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

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

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

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

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...

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.

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

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

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.

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

Experience teaches only the teachable.

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

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

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.'

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

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.

Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

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.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

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

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

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

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

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.

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.

Happiness is like coke — something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it."

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

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

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

Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are in the Golden Future.

The only truly consistent are the dead.

The silent bear no witness against themselves.

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

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

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.

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.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful —because the reproached self isn't abandoned; it remains intact.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.

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

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

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

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of a great sculpture.