Aldous Huxley - People Quotes

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

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
People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art: because the best people do it.

Aldous Huxley
The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking.

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

Aldous Huxley
Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

Aldous Huxley
I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

Aldous Huxley
People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!

Aldous Huxley
Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

Aldous Huxley
Human beings are not born identical. There are many different temperaments and constitutions; and within each psycho-physical class one can find people at very different stages of spiritual development. Forms of worship and spiritual discipline which may be valuable for one individual maybe useless or even positively harmful for another belonging to a different class and standing, within that class, at a lower or higher level of development.

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
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
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
Of course I base my characters partly on the people I know—one can't escape it—but fictional characters are oversimplified; they're much less complex than the people one knows.

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

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
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

Aldous Huxley
Revolution's delightful in the preliminary stages. So long as it's a question of getting rid of people at the top.

Aldous Huxley
To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.

Aldous Huxley
"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.

Aldous Huxley
The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

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 Quaestor turned back the pages until he found himself among the Pensées. We are not satisfied, he read, with the life we have in ourselves and our own being; we want to live an imaginary life in other people's idea of us. Hence all our efforts are directed to seeming what we are not. We labor incessantly to preserve and embellish this imaginary being, and neglect that which is really ours. The Quaestor put down the book, … and ruefully reflected that all his own troubles had arisen from this desire to seem what in fact he was not. To seem a man of action, when in fact he was a contemplative; to seem a politician, when nature had made him an introspective psychologist; to seem a wit, which God had intended him for a sage.

Aldous Huxley
Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death.

Aldous Huxley
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.

Aldous Huxley
It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.

Aldous Huxley
In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.

Aldous Huxley