Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

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

Aldous Huxley
I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement.

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

Aldous Huxley
All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all.

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
I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

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
The consistent thinker, the consistently moral man, is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac.

Aldous Huxley
He had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular

Aldous Huxley
Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

Aldous Huxley
Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.

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

Aldous Huxley
Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.

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

Aldous Huxley
It is because we are predominantly purposeful beings that we are perpetually correcting our immediate sensations. But men are free not to be utilitarianly purposeful. They can sometime be artists, for example. In which case they may like to accept the immediate sensation uncorrected, because it happens to be beautiful.

Aldous Huxley
Love, the last defense against old age. The last, and for those whose good fortune it is to have some one person to care for, or who have learned the infinitely difficult art of loving all their neighbors, the best.

Aldous Huxley
Some people are born with an amazing gift for storytelling; it's a gift I've never had at all.

Aldous Huxley
Generally, I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts. And I correct each page a great deal, or rewrite it several times as I go along.

Aldous Huxley
Writing is a very absorbing occupation and sometimes exhausting. But I've always considered myself very lucky to be able to make a living at something I enjoy doing. So few people can.

Aldous Huxley
I usually work four or five hours a day. I keep at it as long as I can, until I feel myself going stale.

Aldous Huxley
What's the greatest enemy of Christianity to-day? Frozen meat. In the past only members of the upper classes were thoroughly sceptical, despairing, negative. Why? Among other reasons, because they were the only people who could afford to eat too much meat. Now there's cheap Canterbury lamb and Argentine chilled beef. Even the poor can afford to poison themselves into complete scepticism and despair.

Aldous Huxley
Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful -- if strenuously led -- as Christian's in The Pilgrim's Progress.

Aldous Huxley
The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.

Aldous Huxley
The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.

Aldous Huxley
An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.

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
Advances in technology do not abolish the institution of war; they merely modify its manifestations.

Aldous Huxley
All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.

Aldous Huxley
Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to the credit. Except of course when it's more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes. In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards.

Aldous Huxley
The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.

Aldous Huxley