Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what's going on in his heart and mind.

Aldous Huxley
The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth.

Aldous Huxley
The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.

Aldous Huxley
A good housewife, she knew how to hash up the conversational remains of last night's dinner to furnish out this morning's lunch.

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

Aldous Huxley
If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

Aldous Huxley
There has been a general trend in recent times toward a Unitarian mythology and the worship of one God. This is the tendency which it is customary to regard as spiritual progress. On what grounds? Chiefly, so far as one can see, because we in the Twentieth Century West are officially the worshippers of a single divinity. A movement whose consummation is Us must be progressive. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Aldous Huxley
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
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 that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.

Aldous Huxley
I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience? But visionary experience is not always blissful. It's sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven.

Aldous Huxley
How shall we define a god? Expressed in psychological terms (which are primary-there is no getting behind them) a god is something that gives us the peculiar kind of feeling which Professor Otto has called "numinous". Numinous feelings are the original god-stuff from which the theory-making mind extracts the individualised gods of the pantheon.

Aldous Huxley
I will have no Parsons around me but such as drink deep, ride to Hounds and caress the Wives and Daughters of their Parishioners.A Virtuous Parson does nothing to test or exercise the Faith of his Flock.

Aldous Huxley
That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

Aldous Huxley
First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world.

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

Aldous Huxley
Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

Aldous Huxley
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Aldous Huxley
Each man's memory is his private literature, and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.

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
For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.

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

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
Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

Aldous Huxley
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, said Jefferson, it expects what never was and never will be.

Aldous Huxley