Aldous Huxley Quotes And Sayings

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer, novelist, philosopher prominent member of the Huxley family. He graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first in English literature. Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, in particular universalism. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in seven different years.

There Is Only One Corner Of The Universe You Can Be Certain Of Improving, And That's Your Own Self.

There Is No Substitute For Talent. Industry And All Its Virtues Are Of No Avail.

We Are All Geniuses Up To The Age Of Ten.

Thought Must Be Divided Against Itself Before It Can Come To Any Knowledge Of Itself.

Speed, It Seems To Me, Provides The One Genuinely Modern Pleasure.

De Sade Is The One Completely Consistent And Thoroughgoing Revolutionary Of History.

Amour Is The One Human Activity Of Any Importance In Which Laughter And Pleasure Preponderate, If Ever So Slightly, Over Misery And Pain.

A Child-like Man Is Not A Man Whose Development Has Been Arrested; On The Contrary, He Is A Man Who Has Given Himself A Chance Of Continuing To Develop Long After Most Adults Have Muffled Themselves In The Cocoon Of Middle-aged Habit And Convention.

It Takes Two To Make A Murder. There Are Born Victims, Born To Have Their Throats Cut, As The Cut-throats Are Born To Be Hanged.

A Belief In Hell And The Knowledge That Every Ambition Is Doomed To Frustration At The Hands Of A Skeleton Have Never Prevented The Majority Of Human Beings From Behaving As Though Death Were No More Than An Unfounded Rumor.

God Isn't Compatible With Machinery And Scientific Medicine And Universal Happiness. You Must Make Your Choice. Our Civilization Has Chosen Machinery And Medicine And Happiness.

Happiness Is A Hard Master, Particularly Other People's Happiness.

To Travel Is To Discover That Everyone Is Wrong About Other Countries.

My Father Considered A Walk Among The Mountains As The Equivalent Of Churchgoing.

There Isn't Any Formula Or Method. You Learn To Love By Loving - By Paying Attention And Doing What One Thereby Discovers Has To Be Done.

Most Ignorance Is Vincible Ignorance. We Don't Know Because We Don't Want To Know.

Technological Progress Has Merely Provided Us With More Efficient Means For Going Backwards.

Children Are Remarkable For Their Intelligence And Ardor, For Their Curiosity, Their Intolerance Of Shams, The Clarity And Ruthlessness Of Their Vision.

Beauty Is Worse Than Wine, It Intoxicates Both The Holder And Beholder.

Consistency Is Contrary To Nature, Contrary To Life. The Only Completely Consistent People Are Dead.

My Fate Cannot Be Mastered; It Can Only Be Collaborated With And Thereby, To Some Extent, Directed. Nor Am I The Captain Of My Soul; I Am Only Its Noisiest Passenger.

That We Are Not Much Sicker And Much Madder Than We Are Is Due Exclusively To That Most Blessed And Blessing Of All Natural Graces, Sleep.

Experience Is Not What Happens To You; It's What You Do With What Happens To You.

Your True Traveller Finds Boredom Rather Agreeable Than Painful. It Is The Symbol Of His Liberty - His Excessive Freedom. He Accepts His Boredom, When It Comes, Not Merely Philosophically, But Almost With Pleasure.

Uncontrolled, The Hunger And Thirst After God May Become An Obstacle, Cutting Off The Soul From What It Desires. If A Man Would Travel Far Along The Mystic Road, He Must Learn To Desire God Intensely But In Stillness, Passively And Yet With All His Heart And Mind And Strength.

Great Is Truth, But Still Greater, From A Practical Point Of View, Is Silence About Truth. By Simply Not Mentioning Certain Subjects... Totalitarian Propagandists Have Influenced Opinion Much More Effectively Than They Could Have By The Most Eloquent Denunciations.

Proverbs Are Always Platitudes Until You Have Personally Experienced The Truth Of Them.

A Democracy Which Makes Or Even Effectively Prepares For Modern, Scientific War Must Necessarily Cease To Be Democratic. No Country Can Be Really Well Prepared For Modern War Unless It Is Governed By A Tyrant, At The Head Of A Highly Trained And Perfectly Obedient Bureaucracy.

After Silence, That Which Comes Nearest To Expressing The Inexpressible Is Music.

The Propagandist's Purpose Is To Make One Set Of People Forget That Certain Other Sets Of People Are Human.

The Worst Enemy Of Life, Freedom And The Common Decencies Is Total Anarchy; Their Second Worst Enemy Is Total Efficiency.

The More Powerful And Original A Mind, The More It Will Incline Towards The Religion Of Solitude.

Everyone Who Wants To Do Good To The Human Race Always Ends In Universal Bullying.

Sons Have Always A Rebellious Wish To Be Disillusioned By That Which Charmed Their Fathers.

The Impulse To Cruelty Is, In Many People, Almost As Violent As The Impulse To Sexual Love - Almost As Violent And Much More Mischievous.

Hell Isn't Merely Paved With Good Intentions; It's Walled And Roofed With Them. Yes, And Furnished Too.

You Should Hurry Up And Acquire The Cigar Habit. It's One Of The Major Happinesses. And So Much More Lasting Than Love, So Much Less Costly In Emotional Wear And Tear.

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.

The Most Shocking Fact About War Is That Its Victims And Its Instruments Are Individual Human Beings, And That These Individual Beings Are Condemned By The Monstrous Conventions Of Politics To Murder Or Be Murdered In Quarrels Not Their Own.

There Are Things Known And There Are Things Unknown, And In Between Are The Doors Of Perception.

Man Is An Intelligence In Servitude To His Organs.

There's Only One Corner Of The Universe You Can Be Certain Of Improving, And That's Your Own Self.

The Charm Of History And Its Enigmatic Lesson Consist In The Fact That, From Age To Age, Nothing Changes And Yet Everything Is Completely Different.

Dream In A Pragmatic Way.

Every Man Who Knows How To Read Has It In His Power To Magnify Himself, To Multiply The Ways In Which He Exists, To Make His Life Full, Significant And Interesting.

The Vast Majority Of Human Beings Dislike And Even Actually Dread All Notions With Which They Are Not Familiar... Hence It Comes About That At Their First Appearance Innovators Have Generally Been Persecuted, And Always Derided As Fools And Madmen.

Orthodoxy Is The Diehard Of The World Of Thought. It Learns Not, Neither Can It Forget.

One Of The Great Attractions Of Patriotism - It Fulfills Our Worst Wishes. In The Person Of Our Nation We Are Able, Vicariously, To Bully And Cheat. Bully And Cheat, What's More, With A Feeling That We Are Profoundly Virtuous.

Facts Do Not Cease To Exist Because They Are Ignored.

The Secret Of Genius Is To Carry The Spirit Of The Child Into Old Age, Which Means Never Losing Your Enthusiasm.