Novelist · English · 1894 – 1963 · 106 quotes
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
Aldous Huxley
Novelist · English · 1894 – 1963
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
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.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
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.
Every man's memory is his private literature.
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.
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.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
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.
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
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.
Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
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.
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.
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.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
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 proper study of mankind is books.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
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.
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.
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
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.
