Aldous Huxley

“For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim’s time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“In life, man proposes, God disposes.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“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.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“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

“The proper study of mankind is books.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Man has an almost infinite capacity for taking things and people for granted and thereby missing out on the pleasure of being grateful that things aren’t worse and of praising and thereby lifting the spirits of others.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Most lead lives at worst so painful, at best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principle appetites of the soul.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Brave new world.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.” ~ Aldous Huxley

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

“The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual’s favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“God: a gaseous vertebrate.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Can we unite against ourselves for our own higher interest?” ~ Aldous Huxley

“To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Death is the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“It is natural to believe in God when you’re alone – quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“One seventh of your life is spent on Monday.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.” ~ 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.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Applied Science is a conjuror, whose bottomless hat yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Of course the Dharma-body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I – or rather the blessed Not-I – cared to look at.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“War is often described as a law of nature-this is not true: Among the lower animals, war is unknown.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Chastity – the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Liberties aren’t given, they are taken.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“I’d rather be myself. Myself and nasty.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Happiness is like coke – something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Several excuses are always less convincing than one.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.” ~ Aldous Huxley

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

“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

“Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“62,400 repetitions make one truth.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“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

“Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“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

“Pain was a fascinating horror.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The more you know, the more you see.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which love can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“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.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Chaos and ineptitude are anti-human; but so too is a superlatively efficient government, equipped with all the products of a highly developed technology.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to intuitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“In real life there is no such thing as the average man.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Only a person with a Best Seller mind can write Best Sellers.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“But the nature of the universe is such that the ends never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“What would it be like if I were free, not enslaved by my conditioning?” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Ending is better than mending.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Dream in a pragmatic way.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Blood of the world, time staunchless flows; The wound is mortal and is mine.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Real progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“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.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Science in itself is morally neutral; it becomes good or evil according as it is applied.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Nonsense is an assertion of man’s spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Liberty? Why it doesn’t exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Industrialization is the systemic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the thing we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Reality, no matter how utopian, seems to be something people need to frequently take a holiday from.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“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

“No man, however civilized, can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“This growing poverty in the midst of growing population constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to democratic institutions and personal liberty For overpopulation is not compatible with freedom.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“I can sympathize with people’s pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Every man’s memory is his private literature.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience? But visionary experience is not always blissful. It’s sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Experience teaches only the teachable.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“If you don’t gamble, you’ll never win.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The creation by word-power of something out of nothing – what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious it makes little or no difference.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The third petition of the Lord’s Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone’s will be done but their own.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Cleanliness is next to fordliness.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“When life appears to be working against you, when your luck is down, when the supposedly wrong people show up, or when you slip up and return to old, self-defeating habits, recognize the signs that you’re out of harmony with intention.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. WILLIAM BLAKE.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“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

“People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is – just be a little kinder.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“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

“We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“To be excited is still to be unsatisfied.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“A million million spermatozoa, All of them alive: Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!” ~ Aldous Huxley

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“No social stability without individual stability.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Civilization is sterilization.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace, The prurient ape’s defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“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

“When the individual feels, the community reels.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“O brave new world that has such people in it.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“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.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Hinduism the perennial philosophy that is at the core of all religions.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The more stitches, the less riches.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma: Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny; Love’s as good as soma.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can’t.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“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

“For the first time in the history of the world, Buddhism proclaimed a salvation which each individual could gain from him or herself, in this world, during this life, without any least reference to God, or to gods either great or small.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is…” ~ Aldous Huxley

“People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“When the sun rises, it rises for everyone.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“How difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one’s voice!” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Everyone belongs to everyone else.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“I am I, and I wish I weren’t.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The silent bear no witness against themselves.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“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.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The victim of mind-manipulati on does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Nothing – the only perfection, the only absolute. Infinite and eternal nothing.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“In regard to man’s final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with “I,” “me,” “mine,” that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else’s.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Happiness is never grand.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The traveller’s-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“No Romeo-and-Juliet acts, no nonsense about Love with a large L, none of that popular song claptrap with its skies of blue, dreams come true, heaven with you. Just sensuality for its own sake.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.” ~ Aldous Huxley

“What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?” ~ Aldous Huxley