Famous Quotes

Quotes by 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.
• A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
• A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
• A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
• After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
• All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
• An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
• Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
• Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
• Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
• Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
• De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
• Dream in a pragmatic way.
• Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
• 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.
• Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
• Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you.
• Experience teaches only the teachable.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
• Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
• I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
• Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
• It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'
• 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.
• It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
• Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
• Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
• Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
• Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
• Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
• One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
• People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
• 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?