Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including novels and non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
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| Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you. ― Aldous Huxley |
Here Is A Collection Of Aldous Huxley Most Inspiring Quotes. Aldous Huxley Quotes About Life, Freedom And The future. Aldous Huxley Quotes Brave New World. Quotes And Sayings About Experience And Happiness By Aldous Huxley.
Aldous Huxley Quotes and Sayings
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
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.
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.
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.
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
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| Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. ― Aldous Huxley |
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
I am I, and I wish I weren't.
Every man's memory is his private literature.
I like being myself. Myself and nasty.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.
No social stability without individual stability.
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
"I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly."
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
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.
I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then, he added in a lower tone, I ate my own wickedness.
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
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.
Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, 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.
Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.
A love of nature keeps no factories busy.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Ending is better than mending.
There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.
It is natural to believe in God when you're alone-- quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.
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.
It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
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.
A man can smile and smile and be a villain.
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
"The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense."
Liberties aren't given, they are taken.
Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.
"Did you eat something that didn't agree with you?" asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. "I ate civilization."
Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.
Two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.
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.
I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.
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.
We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.
Happiness has got to be paid for. You're paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.
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.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.
When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.
Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.
Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.
But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what's going on in his heart and mind.
Can you say something about nothing?
which is better - to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?
We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.
These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.
The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
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.'
I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Medical Science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.
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