Aldous Huxley Quotes

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

Somewhere in the rain, there will always be an abandoned dog that prevents you from being happy.

At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.

The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun - bang it goes

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising.

To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

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.

...we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.

One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe, when in fact one's just a slight interruption in the ongoing march of entropy.

Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?

It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.

It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.

Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

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

Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted.

The silent bear no witness against themselves.

Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!

Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education.

When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.

Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.

The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.

Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment

There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.

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.

The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.

[I am not] the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

I know very dimly when I start what's going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write.

How difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one's voice!

People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

As late as the seventeenth century, monarchs owned so little furniture that they had to travel from palace to palace with wagon-loads of plate and bedspreads, of carpets and tapestries.

Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.

There are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provocation.

You all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford's: History is bunk.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.