Aldous Huxley Quotes

No social stability without individual stability.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

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

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

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

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

Words are good servants but bad masters.

We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.

We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.

Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

There is no bad day that can’t be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet. This is just truth, plain and simple.

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

Liberties are not given, they are taken.

Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.

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

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.

A man can smile and smile and be a villain.

life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything

Liberty? Why it doesn't exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.

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.

All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.

The third petition of the Lord's Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone's will be done but their own.

The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed - a compass, not a weathercock.

Cleanliness is next to fordliness.

It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.

When the individual feels, the community reels.

All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.

Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.

No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife.

But every one belongs to every one else

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

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.

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

Industrialization is the systemic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the thing we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation.

We can't allow science to undo its own good work.

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.