Aldous Huxley Quotes

Experience teaches only the teachable.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

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 subltly and feel nobly.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they posses a really effective system of mind-manipulation. Under a scientific dictator, education will rea

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

We participate in a tragedy at a comedy we only look.

Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Death Its the only thing we havent succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.

To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance - did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.

Experience is not what happens to a man it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you

All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.

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.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness it is generally the by product of other activities.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas.

Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.

At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface.

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.

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

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.

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

The silent bear no witness against themselves.

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

If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.

The only completely consistent people are the dead.

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but now, as yet, intelligent enough.

A country which proposes to make use of modern war as an instrument of policy must possess a highly centralized, all-powerful executive, hence the absurdity of talking about the defense of democracy by force of arms. A democracy which makes or effectively prepares for modern scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic.

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

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

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.

Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.

That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.

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

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of a great sculpture.

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

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.