Aldous Huxley

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.
The only completely consistent people are the dead.
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
When truth is nothing but the truth, its unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth.
The silent bear no witness against themselves.
That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
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 religous or political ideas.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.
Death … It’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance - did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is Music.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Chastity...the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.
Those who believe they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Facts are ventriloquists dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
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.
Speed provides the one great modern pleasure.
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.