Aldous Huxley Quotes

Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence, ... love is impotent and freedom unattainable.

Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.

I write everything many times over. All my thoughts are second thoughts.

Man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.

Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

Science in itself is morally neutral; it becomes good or evil according as it is applied.

Well... ...That's what you always forget, isn't it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now.

The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality.

Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.

In spiritual matters, knowledge is dependent upon being; as we are, so we know.

Happiness is never grand.

Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.

An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.

Nothing is more dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And love infallibly becomes cold and unimpassioned when it is too lightly made.

Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.

In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.

What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within!

Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems.

The thing that impresses me most about this country is its hopefulness. It is this which distinguishes it from Europe, where there is hopeless depression and fear.

I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example.

No man, however civilized, can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality.

Everyone belongs to everyone else.

A poor degenerate from the ape, Whose hands are four, whose tail's a limb, I contemplate my flaccid shape And know I may not rival him Save with my mind.

I had to depend on Braille for my reading and guide for my walking...I am now wearing no glasses, reading and all without strain...by taking lessons in seeing...optometrists hate the method.

It’s embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder.

The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?

In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

One right-thinking man thinks like all other right-thinking men of his time that is to say, in most cases, like some wrong-thinking man of another time.

Try LSD, 100mg intramuscular... I thought so.

The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture-ground where all may graze, and where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, the sweeter is its flavor, and the more it nourishes.

In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.

In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.

Of the significant and pleasurable experiences of life only the simplest are open indiscriminately to all. The rest cannot be had except by those who have undergone a suitable training.

The only truly consistent are the dead.

Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.

No less than war or statecraft, the history of Economics has its heroic ages.

Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer.

Faith, it is evident, may be relied on to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation.

Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.

There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men.

The advertisement is one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms.

At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?

Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.

In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled.

The critics don't interest me because they're concerned with what's past and done, while I'm concerned with what comes next.

The social body persists although the component cells may change.

To be excited is still to be unsatisfied.

The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is.

The ductless glands secrete among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life.

Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.