Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.

Aldous Huxley
The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.

Aldous Huxley
At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.

Aldous Huxley
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

Aldous Huxley
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates for a secret doubt.

Aldous Huxley
In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low.

Aldous Huxley
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

Aldous Huxley
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Aldous Huxley
We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?

Aldous Huxley
Christ-like in my behavior,
Like every good believer,
I imitate the Savior,
And cultivate a beaver.

Aldous Huxley
Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and the more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.

Aldous Huxley
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

Aldous Huxley
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Aldous Huxley
Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.

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
These effects of mescalin are the sort of effects you could expect to follow the administration of a drug having the power to impair the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve. When the brain runs out of sugar, the undernourished ego grows weak, can't be bothered to undertake the necessary chores, and loses all interest in those spatial and temporal relationships which mean so much to an organism bent on getting on in the world. As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen. … Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence, of the given, unconceptualized event.

Aldous Huxley
At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

Aldous Huxley
A million million spermatozoa,
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
Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.

Aldous Huxley
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Aldous Huxley
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

Aldous Huxley
Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof – that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.

Aldous Huxley
People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

Aldous Huxley
What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within!

Aldous Huxley
Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national

Aldous Huxley
Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.

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
One Folk, One Realm, One Leader. Union with the unity of an insect swarm. Knowledgeless understanding of nonsense and diabolism. And then the newsreel camera had cut back to the serried ranks, the swastikas, the brass bands, the yelling hypnotist on the rostrum. And here once again, in the glare of his inner light, was the brown insectlike column, marching endlessly to the tunes of this rococo horror-music. Onward Nazi soldiers, onward Christian soldiers, onward Marxists and Muslims, onward every chosen People, every Crusader and Holy War-maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into death!

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
Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study.

Aldous Huxley