Aldous Huxley Quotes

Dream in a pragmatic way.

~ Aldous Huxley

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.

~ Aldous Huxley

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

~ Aldous Huxley

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.

~ Aldous Huxley

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

~ Aldous Huxley

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.

~ Aldous Huxley

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.

~ Aldous Huxley

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.

~ Aldous Huxley

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

~ Aldous Huxley

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

~ Aldous Huxley

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

~ Aldous Huxley

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.

~ Aldous Huxley

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

~ Aldous Huxley

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

~ Aldous Huxley

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

~ Aldous Huxley

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

~ Aldous Huxley

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

~ Aldous Huxley

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

~ Aldous Huxley

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

~ Aldous Huxley

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.

~ Aldous Huxley

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.

~ Aldous Huxley

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

~ Aldous Huxley

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

~ Aldous Huxley

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.

~ Aldous Huxley

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

~ Aldous Huxley

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

~ Aldous Huxley

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

~ Aldous Huxley

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.

~ Aldous Huxley

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

~ Aldous Huxley

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

~ Aldous Huxley

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

~ Aldous Huxley

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

~ Aldous Huxley

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

~ Aldous Huxley

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.

~ Aldous Huxley

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

~ Aldous Huxley

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

~ Aldous Huxley