Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.

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
We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.

Aldous Huxley
The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.

Aldous Huxley
Cheerfully... let us advance together, men of letters and men of science, further and further into the ever-expanding regions of the unknown.

Aldous Huxley
Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

Aldous Huxley
Most ignorances are vincible, and in the greater number of cases stupidity is what the Buddha pronounced it to be, a sin. For, consciously, or subconsciously, it is with deliberation that we do not know or fail to understand-because incomprehension allows us, with a good conscience, to evade unpleasant obligations and responsibilities, because ignorance is the best excuse for going on doing what one likes, but ought not, to do.

Aldous Huxley
A world where beauty and logic, painting and analytic geometry, had become one.

Aldous Huxley
Chaos and ineptitude are anti-human; but so too is a superlatively efficient government, equipped with all the products of a highly developed technology.

Aldous Huxley
And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past, you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears-that's what soma is.

Aldous Huxley
To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.

Aldous Huxley
And no wonder; for the new technique of "subliminal projection," as it was called, was intimately associated with mass entertainment, and in the life of civilized human beings massed entertainment now plays a part comparable to that played in the Middle Ages be religion.

Aldous Huxley
Unlike art, science is genuinely progressive. Achievement in the fields of research and technology is cumulative; each generation begins at the point where its predecessor left off.

Aldous Huxley
Proportion... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.

Aldous Huxley
Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of the newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights...and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many.

Aldous Huxley
A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.

Aldous Huxley
The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.

Aldous Huxley
Except under controlled conditions, or in circumstances where it is possible to ignore individuals and consider only large numbers and the law of averages, any kind of accurate foresight is impossible.

Aldous Huxley
Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

Aldous Huxley
Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.

Aldous Huxley
How orderly philosophical is the landscape, are all the inhabitants of this World! It is the creation of a god who "ever plays the geometer."

Aldous Huxley
Science in itself is morally neutral; it becomes good or evil according as it is applied.

Aldous Huxley
Applied Science is a conjuror, whose bottomless hat yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas.

Aldous Huxley
War is often described as a law of nature-this is not true: Among the lower animals, war is unknown.

Aldous Huxley
If only people would realize that moral principles are like measles.... They have to be caught. And only the people who've got them can pass on the contagion.

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
It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live.

Aldous Huxley
Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.

Aldous Huxley
If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather's a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military.

Aldous Huxley
The poet's place, it seems to me, is with the Mr. Hydes of human nature.

Aldous Huxley