Famous Quotes

Quotes by Aldous Huxley

• Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
• Science has explained nothing the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
• So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
• Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
• Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
• Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
• That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
• That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
• 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.
• 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.
• The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
• The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
• 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.
• 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.
• The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
• The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
• There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
• 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.
• There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
• Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
• To his dog, every man is Napoleon hence the constant popularity of dogs.
• To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
• 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.
• We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
• 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.
• What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
• 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.
• 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.
• You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
• You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
• 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.