Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

Science sometimes builds new bridges between universes of discourse and experience hitherto regarded as separate and heterogeneous. But science also breaks down old bridges and opens gulfs between universes that, traditionally, had been connected.

Aldous Huxley
The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.

Aldous Huxley
"Give them a few figures, Mr. Foster," said the Director, who was tired of talking.

Aldous Huxley
Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes.... it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it.

Aldous Huxley
We are so anxious to achieve some particular end that we never pay attention to the psycho-physical means whereby that end is to be gained. So far as we are concerned, any old means is good enough. But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

Aldous Huxley
Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer.

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
Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories.

Aldous Huxley
Science is angling in the mud — angling for immortality and for anything else that may happen to turn up.

Aldous Huxley
We lie to ourselves in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes.

Aldous Huxley
The innocence of those who grind the faces of the poor, but refrain from pinching the bottoms of their neighbour's wives! The innocence of Ford, the innocence of Rockefeller! The nineteenth century was the Age of Innocence--that sort of innocence. With the result that we're now almost ready to say that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making love.

Aldous Huxley
Magic and devils offend our sense of probabilities.

Aldous Huxley
The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.

Aldous Huxley
I think we have to prepare the mind in one way or another to accept the great uprush or downrush, whichever you like to call it, of the greater non-self.

Aldous Huxley
Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.

Aldous Huxley
And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else

Aldous Huxley
Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.

Aldous Huxley
Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.

Aldous Huxley
The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work' with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.

Aldous Huxley
Knowledge is the highest good, truth the supreme value, all the rest is secondary and subordinate.

Aldous Huxley
Under the present dispensation, the great majority of factories are little despotisms, benevolent in some cases, malevolent in others. Even where benevolence prevails, passive obedience is demanded by the workers, who are ruled by overseers, not of their own election, but appointed from above. In theory they may be the subjects of a democratic state; but in practice they spend the whole of their working lives as the subjects of a petty tyrant.

Aldous Huxley
Ram it in, ram it in! Children's heads are hollow. Ram it in, ram it in! Still there's more to follow.

Aldous Huxley
For some strange reason murder has always seemed more respectable than fornication. Few people are shocked when they hear God described as the God of Battles; but what an outcry there would be if anyone spoke of him as the God of Brothels.

Aldous Huxley
Too much theorizing, as we all know, is fatal to the soul.

Aldous Huxley
This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.

Aldous Huxley
In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.

Aldous Huxley
It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well.

Aldous Huxley
Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.

Aldous Huxley
All of them alive: Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive. And among that billion minus one Might have chanced to be Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne — But the One was Me.

Aldous Huxley
All science is based upon an act of faith — faith in the validity of the mind's logical processes, faith in the ultimate explicability of the world, faith that the laws of thought are laws of things.

Aldous Huxley