Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

It is because we are predominantly purposeful beings that we are perpetually correcting our immediate sensations. But men are free not to be utilitarianly purposeful. They can sometime be artists, for example. In which case they may like to accept the immediate sensation uncorrected, because it happens to be beautiful.

Aldous Huxley
Love, the last defense against old age. The last, and for those whose good fortune it is to have some one person to care for, or who have learned the infinitely difficult art of loving all their neighbors, the best.

Aldous Huxley
Some people are born with an amazing gift for storytelling; it's a gift I've never had at all.

Aldous Huxley
Generally, I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts. And I correct each page a great deal, or rewrite it several times as I go along.

Aldous Huxley
Writing is a very absorbing occupation and sometimes exhausting. But I've always considered myself very lucky to be able to make a living at something I enjoy doing. So few people can.

Aldous Huxley
I usually work four or five hours a day. I keep at it as long as I can, until I feel myself going stale.

Aldous Huxley
What's the greatest enemy of Christianity to-day? Frozen meat. In the past only members of the upper classes were thoroughly sceptical, despairing, negative. Why? Among other reasons, because they were the only people who could afford to eat too much meat. Now there's cheap Canterbury lamb and Argentine chilled beef. Even the poor can afford to poison themselves into complete scepticism and despair.

Aldous Huxley
Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful -- if strenuously led -- as Christian's in The Pilgrim's Progress.

Aldous Huxley
The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.

Aldous Huxley
The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.

Aldous Huxley
An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.

Aldous Huxley
We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education. This, of course, is not surprising. The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.

Aldous Huxley
Advances in technology do not abolish the institution of war; they merely modify its manifestations.

Aldous Huxley
All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.

Aldous Huxley
Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to the credit. Except of course when it's more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes. In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards.

Aldous Huxley
The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.

Aldous Huxley
The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.

Aldous Huxley
How difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one's voice!

Aldous Huxley
The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable

Aldous Huxley
The inconveniences and horrors of the pox are perfectly well known to every one; but still the disease flourishes and spreads. Several million people were killed in a recent war and half the world ruined; but we all busily go on in courses that make another event of the same sort inevitable. Experientia docet? Experientia doesn't.

Aldous Huxley
Science has "explained" nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Aldous Huxley
Dinted dimpled wimpled-his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.

Aldous Huxley
Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trains--the few that there were--stopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water.

Aldous Huxley
In a few years, no doubt, marriage licences will be sold like dog licences, good for 12 months.

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

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

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
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
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