Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

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
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

Aldous Huxley
Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the higher life.

Aldous Huxley
The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.

Aldous Huxley
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

Aldous Huxley
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

Aldous Huxley
I used to think I had no will to power. Now I perceive that I vented it on thoughts, rather than people. Conquering an unknown province of knowledge. Getting the better of a problem. Forcing ideas to associate or come apart. Bullying recalcitrant words to assume a certain pattern. All the fun of being a dictator without any risks and responsibilities.

Aldous Huxley
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

Aldous Huxley
The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious—it makes little or no difference.

Aldous Huxley
The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, The prurient ape's defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much.

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

Aldous Huxley
Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences, human remorses, human compensatory fantasies, human terrors, human cruelties. If all men were alike, all the world would worship the same God.

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

Aldous Huxley
The second doctrine of the Perennial Philosophy — that it is possible to know the Divine Ground by a direct intuition higher than discursive reasoning — is to be found in all the great religions of the world. A philosopher who is content merely to know about the ultimate Reality — theoretically and by hearsay — is compared by Buddha to a herdsman of other men's cows. Mohammed uses an even homelier barnyard metaphor. For him the philosopher who has not realized his metaphysics is just an ass bearing a load of books. Christian, Hindu, Taoist teachers wrote no less emphatically about the absurd pretensions of mere learning and analytic reasoning.

Aldous Huxley
Out psychological experiences are all equally facts.

Aldous Huxley
Wild inside; raging, writhing—yes, "writhing" was the word, writhing with desire. But outwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly—baa, baa, baa.

Aldous Huxley