Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems.

Aldous Huxley
Dying is almost the least spiritual of our acts, more strictly carnal even than the act of love. There are Death Agonies that are like the strainings of the Costive at stool.

Aldous Huxley
Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species.

Aldous Huxley
Atoms, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say those aspects of the atom which scientists chose to consider, are immeasurable less complicated than men.

Aldous Huxley
Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.

Aldous Huxley
Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.

Aldous Huxley
The social body persists although the component cells may change.

Aldous Huxley
Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them.

Aldous Huxley
Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.

Aldous Huxley
Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

Aldous Huxley
When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.

Aldous Huxley
I'm pretty good at inventing phrases - you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically* obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.

Aldous Huxley
Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet.

Aldous Huxley
The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.

Aldous Huxley
Books have their destinies like men. And their fates, as made by generations of readers, are very different from the destinies foreseen for them by their authors. Gulliver's Travels, with a minimum of expurgation, has become a children's book; a new illustrated edition is produced every Christmas. That's what comes of saying profound things about humanity in terms of a fairy story.

Aldous Huxley
A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

Aldous Huxley
Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are in the Golden Future.

Aldous Huxley
The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.

Aldous Huxley
Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it. If we fail to do our share, but rather choose to rely on self-will and self-direction, we shall not only get no help from the graces bestowed on us, we shall actually make it impossible for further graces to be given.

Aldous Huxley
The instinct of acquisitiveness has more perverts, I believe, than the instinct of sex. At any rate, people seem to me odder about money than about even their amours.

Aldous Huxley
The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

Aldous Huxley
The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.

Aldous Huxley
Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!

Aldous Huxley
Asceticism, it is evident, has a double motivation. If men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments; it is also because they long to visit the mind's antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing.

Aldous Huxley
Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.

Aldous Huxley
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

Aldous Huxley
Seated upon the convex mound Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays And sings his canticles and hymns, Making the hollow vault resound God's goodness and mysterious ways, Till the great fish spouts music as he swims.

Aldous Huxley
Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.

Aldous Huxley
Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else's.

Aldous Huxley
Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.

Aldous Huxley