Aldous Huxley Quotes

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

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

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

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

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

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

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

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

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

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

Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.

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

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.

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.

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat - and the boat is perpetually sinking.

The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.

Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.

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.

which is better - to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?

The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.

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

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

Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I'm in a coma.

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

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.

On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.

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.

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

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.

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

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.