Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

"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
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

Aldous Huxley
However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.

Aldous Huxley
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

Aldous Huxley
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

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
Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

Aldous Huxley
By comparison with a night-club, churches are positively gay.

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
Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure--chemically pure, I mean,... not morally.

Aldous Huxley
Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations.

Aldous Huxley
Think of the inexpugnable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!

Aldous Huxley
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Aldous Huxley
Of course I base my characters partly on the people I know—one can't escape it—but fictional characters are oversimplified; they're much less complex than the people one knows.

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

Aldous Huxley
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

Aldous Huxley
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

Aldous Huxley
There are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provincialism.

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

Aldous Huxley