Aldous Huxley quotes

“The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.”

— Aldous Huxley

“The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.”

— Aldous Huxley

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”

— Aldous Huxley

“There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”

— Aldous Huxley

“We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look. ”

— Aldous Huxley

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”

— Aldous Huxley

“The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.”

— Aldous Huxley

“That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent. ”

— Aldous Huxley

“We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.”

— Aldous Huxley

“What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.”

— Aldous Huxley

“There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.”

— Aldous Huxley

“The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science. ”

— Aldous Huxley

“It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.”

— Aldous Huxley

“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.”

— Aldous Huxley

“The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.”

— Aldous Huxley

“So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.”

— Aldous Huxley

“Several excuses are always less convincing than one.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

“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.”

— Aldous Huxley

“What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.”

— Aldous Huxley

“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.”

— Aldous Huxley

“The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.”

— Aldous Huxley

“From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley