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 Quote
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.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Every person who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make life full, significant, and interesting.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Experience teaches only the teachable.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
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 Quote
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
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.'
- Aldous Huxley Quote
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 Quote
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Most human beings have an absolute and infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
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 Quote
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.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
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 Quote
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
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 Quote
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 Quote
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 Quote
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 Quote
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
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 Quote
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
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 Quote
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
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 Quote
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 Quote
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 Quote
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
- Aldous Huxley Quote
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 Quote
