Aldous Huxley Quotes

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power....

~ Aldous Huxley

In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don't exist. I am just a Vox et preaterea nihil.

~ Aldous Huxley

Today I feel no wish to demonstrate that sanity is impossible. On the contrary, though I remain no less sadly certain than in the past that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it can be achieved and would like to see more of it.

~ Aldous Huxley

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

~ Aldous Huxley

For 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 religious or political idols

~ Aldous Huxley

Work, the gospel of work, the sanctity of work, laborare est orare - all that tripe and nonsense. 'Work!' he once broke out contemptuously against the reasonable expostulations of Philip Quarles, 'work is no more respectable than alcohol, and it serves exactly the same purpose: it just distracts the mind, makes a man forget himself. Work's simply a drug, that's all. It's humiliating that men shouldn't be able to live without drugs, soberly; it's humiliating that they shouldn't have the courage to see the world and themselves as they really are. They must intoxicate themselves with work. It's stupid. The gospel of work's just a gospel of stupidity and funk. Work may be prayer; but it's also hiding one's head in the sand, it's also making such a din and a dust that a man can't hear himself speak or see his own hand before his face. It's hiding yourself from yourself. No wonder the Samuel Smileses and the big business men are such enthusiasts for work. Work gives them the comforting illusion of existing, even of being important. If they stopped working, they'd realize that they simply weren't there at all, most of them. Just holes in the air, that's all. Holes with perhaps a rather nasty smell in them. Most Smilesian souls must smell rather nasty, I should think. No wonder they daren't stop working. They might find out what they really are, or rather aren't. It's a risk they haven't the courage to take.

~ Aldous Huxley

Shearwater sighed, like a whale in the night.

~ Aldous Huxley

He was digging in his garden--digging, too, in his own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his thought. Death--and he drove in his spade once, and again, and yet again. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools they way to dusty death. A convincing thunder rumbled through the words. He lifted another spadeful of earth. Why had Linda died? Why had she been allowed to become gradually less than human and at last... He shuddered. A good kissing carrion. He planted his foot on his spade and stamped it fiercely into the tough ground. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kills us for their sport. Thunder again; words that proclaimed themselves true--truer somehow than truth itself. And yet that same Gloucester had called them ever-gentle gods. Besides, thy best of rest is sleep, and that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st thy death which is no more. No more than sleep. Sleep. Perchance to dream. His spade struck against a stone; he stooped to pick it up. For in that sleep of death, what dreams...?

~ Aldous Huxley

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

~ Aldous Huxley

It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination.

~ Aldous Huxley

He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words.

~ Aldous Huxley

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations of misery.

~ Aldous Huxley

That's what you men are always doing; it's so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire.

~ Aldous Huxley

The worth of a gift lies as much in the way it is offered as in its intrinsic value.

~ Aldous Huxley

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.

~ Aldous Huxley

-make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being...

~ Aldous Huxley

For I am you and you are I.

~ Aldous Huxley

An old codger rampant and still learning.

~ Aldous Huxley

Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves to multiply the ways in which they exist to make their life full significant and interesting.

~ Aldous Huxley

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

~ Aldous Huxley

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

~ Aldous Huxley

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body.

~ Aldous Huxley

The consistent thinker ... is either a walking mummy or else if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality a fanatical monomaniac.

~ 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 rumour and survival a thing not beyond the bounds of possibility.

~ Aldous Huxley

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

~ Aldous Huxley

Faith may be relied upon to produce sustained action and more rarely sustained contemplation.

~ Aldous Huxley

Every ceiling when reached becomes a floor upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.

~ Aldous Huxley

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach.

~ Aldous Huxley

Most human beings have an absolute and infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

~ Aldous Huxley

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

~ Aldous Huxley

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

~ 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

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

~ Aldous Huxley

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

~ Aldous Huxley

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

~ Aldous Huxley

The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know one must be an actor as well as a spectator.

~ Aldous Huxley

Thanks to words we have been able to rise above the brutes and thanks to words we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

~ Aldous Huxley

Writers write to influence their readers their preachers their auditors but always at bottom to be more themselves.

~ Aldous Huxley

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

~ Aldous Huxley

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

~ Aldous Huxley