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Aldous Huxley Quotes

Facts Do Not Cease to Exist Because They Are Ignored

Aldous Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly fifty books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems.

Writer | British

Born: 1894-07-26 in Godalming, United Kingdom

Died: November 22, 1963 in Los Angeles, USA

Dream in a pragmatic way.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley
age

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.

Aldous Huxley
age

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Aldous Huxley
age

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.

Aldous Huxley
art

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?

Aldous Huxley
art

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.

Aldous Huxley
art

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

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley
dad

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.

Aldous Huxley

Dream in a pragmatic way.

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

Experience teaches only the teachable.

Aldous Huxley

Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you.

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

Aldous Huxley
god

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.

Aldous Huxley
god

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.

Aldous Huxley
god

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

Aldous Huxley

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?

Aldous Huxley

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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.

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

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

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

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.'

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley
men

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

Aldous Huxley
men

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.

Aldous Huxley
men

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.

Aldous Huxley
men

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

Aldous Huxley
men

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

Aldous Huxley
men

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.

Aldous Huxley
men

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.

Aldous Huxley

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley
pet

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.

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Aldous Huxley

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley
war

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.

Aldous Huxley
war

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.

Aldous Huxley
war

Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

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.

Aldous Huxley

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

Aldous Huxley

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