Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.

Aldous Huxley
And no wonder; for the new technique of "subliminal projection," as it was called, was intimately associated with mass entertainment, and in the life of civilized human beings massed entertainment now plays a part comparable to that played in the Middle Ages be religion.

Aldous Huxley
Unlike art, science is genuinely progressive. Achievement in the fields of research and technology is cumulative; each generation begins at the point where its predecessor left off.

Aldous Huxley
Proportion... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.

Aldous Huxley
Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of the newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights...and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many.

Aldous Huxley
A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.

Aldous Huxley
The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.

Aldous Huxley
Except under controlled conditions, or in circumstances where it is possible to ignore individuals and consider only large numbers and the law of averages, any kind of accurate foresight is impossible.

Aldous Huxley
Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.

Aldous Huxley
Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.

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

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

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
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
It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live.

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
If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather's a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military.

Aldous Huxley
The poet's place, it seems to me, is with the Mr. Hydes of human nature.

Aldous Huxley
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
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
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
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