Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Quotes

• 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.