Aldous Huxley quotes

“Dream in a pragmatic way.”

— Aldous Huxley

“My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

“A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.”

— Aldous Huxley

“God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Every man's memory is his private literature.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

“Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

“There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

“If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life? ”

— Aldous Huxley

“Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

“There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

“Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.”

— Aldous Huxley

“The proper study of mankind is books.”

— Aldous Huxley

“A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

“Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations. ”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

“Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.”

— Aldous Huxley

“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.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too. ”

— Aldous Huxley