Aldous Huxley Quotes | GloryQuotes

Aldous Huxley Quotes About Life

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

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.

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

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.

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?

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 Quotes About Honesty

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

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

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

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

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.

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.

More 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 man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

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

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

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

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

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

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

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

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

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

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

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

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

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

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.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

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

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

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

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

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

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.

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

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

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

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

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

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.

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

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

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

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.

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.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

Browse 106 quotes attributed to Aldous Huxley, listed in the source data as a English Novelist, organized around themes such as Life, Honesty, History. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.