Aldous Huxley quotes

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

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

God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

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.

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.

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.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

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.

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.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

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.

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

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

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.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

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.

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

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

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

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

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

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.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.

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

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

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

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

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.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

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

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

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.

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.

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

Dream in a pragmatic way.

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.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'

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.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

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

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.

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.

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

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

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.

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.