Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Quotes

• Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.

• Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity and tolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

• Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.

• Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you

• Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them.

• Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.

• The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

• After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

• From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

• Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.

• Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored

• Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

• Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

• There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

• Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.

• To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

• A country which proposes to make use of modern war as an instrument of policy must possess a highly centralized, all-powerful executive, hence the absurdity of talking about the defense of democracy by force of arms. A democracy which makes or effectively prepares for modern scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic.

• People are much too solemn about things - I'm all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.

• If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.

• 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.