Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

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

Aldous Huxley
The poet is, etymologically, the maker. Like all makers, he requires a stock of raw materials — in his case, experience. Now experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and co-ordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression.

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

Aldous Huxley
We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.

Aldous Huxley
A priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed – a compass, not a weathercock.

Aldous Huxley
To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.

Aldous Huxley
All of us desire a better state of society. But society cannot become better before two great tasks are performed.Unless peace can be firmly established and the prevailing obsession with money and power profoundly modified, there is no hope of any desirable change being made.

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

Aldous Huxley
A poor degenerate from the ape,
Whose hands are four, whose tail's a limb,
I contemplate my flaccid shape And know I may not rival him Save with my mind.

Aldous Huxley
The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. 'Great is the truth', but still greater…is silence about truth.

Aldous Huxley
Of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently — though as little of one as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

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

Aldous Huxley
People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

Aldous Huxley
A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world — intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.

Aldous Huxley
We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education. This, of course, is not surprising. The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.

Aldous Huxley
I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am, unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied... In spite of everything I survive.

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

Aldous Huxley
Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

Aldous Huxley
There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men.

Aldous Huxley
"Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual- and after all, wha is an individual? "...." We can make a new one with the greatest of ease- as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself."

Aldous Huxley
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.

Aldous Huxley
However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.

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

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