Words matter. These are the best Aldous Huxley Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
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.
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.
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.
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.
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.
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.
The proper study of mankind is books.
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 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 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.
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
Every man’s memory is his private literature.
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
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.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
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.’
Experience teaches only the teachable.
