Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.

Aldous Huxley
That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.

Aldous Huxley
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.

Aldous Huxley
Why did it occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And conversely why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness.

Aldous Huxley
Science is angling in the mud — angling for immortality and for anything else that may happen to turn up.

Aldous Huxley
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrong-doing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Aldous Huxley
Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.

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
Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.

Aldous Huxley
Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

Aldous Huxley
The ductless glands secrete among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life.

Aldous Huxley
Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation.

Aldous Huxley
A man may have strong humanitarian and democratic principles, but if he happens to have been brought up as a bath-taking, shirt-changing lover of fresh air, he will have to overcome certain physical repugnance before he can bring himself to put those principles into practice.

Aldous Huxley
Life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything

Aldous Huxley
The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.

Aldous Huxley
Beauty for some provides escape,
Who gain a happiness in eyeing
The gorgeous buttocks of the ape
Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

Aldous Huxley
The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

Aldous Huxley
[...] Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.

Aldous Huxley
To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.

Aldous Huxley
Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.

Aldous Huxley