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Aldous Huxley

260 quotes

• “I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Limbo (1920), "Cynthia

• “I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love with you that I could commit any folly. When will you women understand that one isn't insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won't allow one to have. I don't know what the devil ever induced me to marry you. It was all a damned stupid, practical joke. And now you go about saying I'm a murderer. I won't stand it.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Mortal Coils (1921), "The Gioconda Smile" [http://www.online-literature.com/aldous_huxley/mortal-coils/

• “Stupidity or reason? Oh, there was no choice now. It was imbecility every time.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Mortal Coils (1921), "The Gioconda Smile

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

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Those Barren Leaves (1925)

• “What the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Essays Old and New (1926), "Where are the Movies Moving?

• “Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934)

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

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: In Reader's Digest (1934)

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

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Words and Behaviour", The Olive Tree (1936)

• “History teaches us that war is not inevitable. Once again, it is for us to choose whether we use war or some other method of settling the ordinary and unavoidable conflicts between groups of men.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: What Are You Going To Do About It? The case for constructive peace (1936)

• “All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Pacifism and Philosophy" (1936)

• “My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1937) edited by Nancy Cunard and publisehd by the Left Review

• “As for 'taking sides' — the choice, it seems to me, is no longer between two users of violence, two systems of dictatorship. Violence and dictatorship cannot produce peace and liberty; they can only produce the results of violence and dictatorship, results with which history has made us only too sickeningly familiar. The choice now is between militarism and pacifism. To me, the necessity of pacifism seems absolutely clear.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (1937) edited by Nancy Cunard and published by the Left Review

• “A totally unmystical world would be a world totally blind and insane.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Grey Eminence (1940)

• “Other curious and rather ominous consequences of war are the increased anti-Semitism which one meets in all classes, particularly the common people, and the strong recrudescence of anti-negro passions in the South. The first is due to the age-old dislike of a monied, influential and pushing minority, coupled with a special grudge against the Jews as being chiefly instrumental, in public opinion, in getting America into the war”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Julian Huxley (1943), published in Letters of Aldous Huxley (1970), p. 486; also in Aldous Huxley: A Quest for Values (2017), n.p.

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

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Religion and Time" in C. Isherwood (ed.) Vedanta for the Western World (1945)

• “At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1952)

• “The trouble with fiction... is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: John Rivers" in The Genius and the Goddess (1955)

• “You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: John Rivers in The Genius and the Goddess (1955)

• “Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narcohypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letters of Aldous Huxley, (1969)

• “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: A Case of Voluntary Ignorance" in Collected Essays (1959)

• “Of course I base my characters partly on the people I know—one can't escape it—but fictional characters are oversimplified; they're much less complex than the people one knows.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview, The Paris Review (1960)

• “Brutes are merely brutal; men and women are capable of being devils and lunatics. They are no less capable of being fully human-even, occasionally, of being a bit more than fully human, of being saints, heroes and geniuses.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Introduction to You Are Not The Target by Laura Archera Huxley (1963)

• “Words are good servants but bad masters.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As quoted by Laura Huxley, in conversation with Alan Watts about her memoir This Timeless Moment (1968), in Pacifica Archives #BB2037 [sometime between 1968-1973])

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

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Interview in Time magazine (December 1957)

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

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1962 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter (10 July 1962), quoted in Donald Watt (ed.) Aldous Huxley: The Citical Heritage (1975)

• “Be gentle with them, Timothy. They want to be free, but they don't know how. Teach them. Reassure them.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Reported to be Huxley's last words to Timothy Leary, which Huxley whispered from his deathbed. Quoted in Timothy Leary, Flashbacks: A Personal and Cultural History of an Era (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1990 [1983]),…

• “'Tis the Lord's doing. Marvellous is the plan By which this best of worlds is wisely planned. One law He made for woman, one for man: We bow the head and do not understand.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A million million spermatozoa All of them alive: Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Shame to have ousted your betters thus, Taking ark while the others remained outside! Better for all of us, froward Homunculus, If you’d quietly died!”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Beauty for some provides escape, Who gain a happiness in eyeing The gorgeous buttocks of the ape Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Then brim the bowl with atrabilious liquor! We'll pledge our Empire vast across the flood: For Blood, as all men know, than Water's thicker, But Water's wider, thank the Lord, than Blood.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Ragtime... but when the wearied Band Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand, And there we sit in peaceful calm, Quietly sweating palm to palm.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Dinted, dimpled, wimpled — his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made phrase about them. And then there are lots of lovely names and words — Monophysite, Iamblichus, Pomponazzi; you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Wild inside; raging, writhing — yes, "writhing" was the word, writhing with desire. But outwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly — baa, baa, baa.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one's mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Mary looked at it for a moment, gravely and intently. Her purple pyjamas clothed her with an ampleness that hid the lines of her body; she looked like some large, comfortable, unjointed toy, a sort of Teddy bear — but a Teddy bear with an angel's head, pink cheeks, and hair like a bell of gold.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical. Profound and beautiful truth!”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Words are man's first and most grandiose invention. With language, he created a whole new universe; what wonder if he loved words and attributed power to them! With fitted, harmonious words the magicians summoned rabbits out of empty hats and spirits from the elements. Their descendants, the literary men, still go on with the process, morticing their verbal formulas together, and, before the power of the finished spell, trembling with delight and awe. Rabbits out of empty hats? No, their spells are more subtly powerful, for they evoke emotions out of empty minds.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Words — I wonder if you can realize how much I love them. You are too much preoccupied with mere things and ideas and people to understand the full beauty of words. Your mind is not a literary mind.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory — reason.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Everything that ever gets done in this world is done by madmen.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If you want to get men to act reasonably, you must set about persuading them in a maniacal manner.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don't exist. I am just a Vox et præterea nihil.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Nature, or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is too large, too complicated, above all too utterly pointless and incomprehensible.”

  Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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