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Aldous Huxley

260 quotes

“An irrelevance, and your life’s altered.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our civilisation being what it is, you've got to spent eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It's very disagreeable, I know. It's humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You've got to do it, otherwise the whole fabric of our world will fall to bits and we'll starve. Do the job then, idiotically and mechanically; and spend your leisure hours in being a real complete man or woman.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody's happy.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Happiness is like coke — something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing — the only perfection, the only absolute. Infinite and eternal nothing.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Experience teaches only the teachable.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How shall we define a god? Expressed in psychological terms (which are primary-there is no getting behind them) a god is something that gives us the peculiar kind of feeling which Professor Otto has called "numinous". Numinous feelings are the original god-stuff from which the theory-making mind extracts the individualised gods of the pantheon.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is only by poets that the life of any epoch can be synthesized. Encyclopaedias and guides to knowledge cannot do it, for the good reason that they affect only the intellectual surface of a man’s life. The lower layers, the core of his being, they leave untouched.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He acted as if he could detect in her face nothing but its external beauties of form and texture. Whereas, of course, flesh is never wholly opaque; the soul shows through the walls of its receptacle.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That which besets me is indifference. I can't be bothered about people. Or rather, won't. For I avoid, carefully, all occasions for being bothered. ... Indifference is a form of sloth, and sloth in its turn is one of the symptoms of loveless-ness. One isn't lazy about what one loves. The problem is: how to love?”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Query: how to combine the belief that the world is a to a great extent illusory with belief that it is none the less essential to improve the illusion? How to be simultaneously dispassionate and not indifferent, serene like an old man and active like a young one?”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life was so short, and books so countlessly many.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I used to think I had no will to power. Now I perceive that I vented it on thoughts, rather than people. Conquering an unknown province of knowledge. Getting the better of a problem. Forcing ideas to associate or come apart. Bullying recalcitrant words to assume a certain pattern. All the fun of being a dictator without any risks and responsibilities.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Leaving you defenceless against the full consciousness of the fact that you can’t do without your fellow humans, and that, when you’re with them, they make you sick.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Helen’s was the usual communist argument — no peace or social justice without a preliminary “liquidation” of capitalists, liberals and so forth. As though you could use violent, unjust means and achieve peace and justice! Means determine ends; and must be like the ends proposed. Means intrinsically different from the ends proposed achieve ends like themselves, not like those they were meant to achieve.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But if one doesn't really exist, one wonders why...” she hesitated. “Why one makes such a fuss about things,” Anthony suggested. “All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self that isn't really a self — just the result of a lot of accidents. And of course,” he went on, “once you start wondering, you see at once that there is no reason for making such a fuss. And then you don't make a fuss—that is, if you're sensible. Like me,” he added, smiling.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Chastity — the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Death," said Mark Staithes. "It's the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Certain memories, certain trains of thought are like the aching tooth one must always be touching just to make sure it still hurts.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) first seen 1956 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 1, p. 9 [2012 reprint]. Also in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" in Adonis and the Alphabet (1956); later in Collected Essays (1959), p. 293
“The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 1, p. 10 [2012 reprint]
“It often happens that reforms merely have the effect of transferring the undesirable tendencies of individuals from one channel to another channel. An old outlet for some particular wickedness is closed; but a new outlet is opened. The wickedness is not abolished; it is merely provided with a different set of opportunities for self-expression.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 3, p. 20 [2012 reprint]
“So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 8, p. 99 [2012 reprint]
“Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 9, p. 138 [2012 reprint]
“Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error — the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 14, p. 309 [2012 reprint]
“Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalist system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort, from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of Geneva and New England.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 14, p. 315 [2012 reprint]
“One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 14, p. 316 [2012 reprint]
“First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 14, p. 333 [2012 reprint]
“A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world — intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 14, p. 333 [2012 reprint]
“It is not only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber's craving for position and social distinction.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 14, p. 358 [2012 reprint]
“The unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground has, as its necessary condition, self-abnegation and charity. Only by means of self-abnegation and charity can we clear away the evil, folly and ignorance which constitute the thing we call our personality and prevent us from becoming aware of the spark of divinity illuminating the inner man.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In regard to man's final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. The degree to which this unitive knowledge is achieved here on earth determines the degree to which it will be enjoyed in the posthumous state. Contemplation of truth is the end, action the means.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many Catholic mystics have affirmed that, at a certain stage of that contemplative prayer in which, according to the most authoritative theologians, the life of Christian perfection ultimately consists, it is necessary to put aside all thought of the Incarnation as distracting from the higher knowledge of that which has been incarnated. From this fact have arisen misunderstandings in plenty and a number of intellectual difficulties.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human beings are not born identical. There are many different temperaments and constitutions; and within each psycho-physical class one can find people at very different stages of spiritual development. Forms of worship and spiritual discipline which may be valuable for one individual maybe useless or even positively harmful for another belonging to a different class and standing, within that class, at a lower or higher level of development.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Bhagavad-Gita is perhaps the most systematic scriptural statement of the Perennial Philosophy. To a world at war, a world that, because it lacks the intellectual and spiritual prerequisites to peace, can only hope to patch up some kind of precarious armed truce, it stands pointing, clearly and unmistakably, to the only road of escape from the self-imposed necessity of self-destruction.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. Your own self," he repeated. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you've worked on your own corner.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Facts are ventriloquists' dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Our kingdom go' is the necessary and unavoidable corollary of 'Thy kingdom come.' For the more there is of self, the less there is of God.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in a ‘state of grace.’ All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine reality. We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) said by 1963 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source