Aldous Huxley famous quotes

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling...
-- Aldous Huxley

#Children #Dark #Self

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

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational

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

#Inspirational #Motivational #Positive

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

#Generations #Next #Mass

There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Taken #People #Tears

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Communication #Men #Two

All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in subsituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly,those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.
-- Aldous Huxley

#War #Vocabulary #Lasts

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

#Book #Reading #Writing

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

#Beauty #Hurt #Wine

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

#Change #Life Changing #Yoga

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

#Motivational #Music #Wisdom

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.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Blessed #Sleep #Blessing

... one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Thinking #Oneself

So now you can let go, my darling...Let go...Let go of this poor old body. You don't need it anymore. Let it fall away from you. Leave it lying there like a pile of worn-out clothes...Go on, my darling, go on into the Light, into the peace, into the living peace of the Clear Light.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Letting Go #Lying #Fall

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

#War #History #Facts

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

#Men #Long #Political

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

#Freedom #Food #Optimistic

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Truth #Honesty #Lying

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

#Enemy #Literature #Anarchy

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

#Knowledge #Science #Darkness

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.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Love #Attention #Done

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

#Happiness #Pursuit Of Happiness #Conscious

Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Wise #Wisdom #Science

What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Fate #College #Expression

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

#Spiritual #Philosophy #Humanity

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

#Looks #Misery #Compensation

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Inspirational #Strong #Soul

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Book #Reading #Past

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

#Fear #Giving #Religion

Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Evil #Mind #Prohibition

Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Nature #Men #Tyrants

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

#Birthday #Children #Mean

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

#Mean #Technology #Progress

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Spiritual #Ethical #Individual

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Levels #Able #Thanks

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

#Education #Children #Teaching

We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Morality

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

#Thinking #Compassion #Tyrants

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

#Dog #Animal #Men

Consider the problem of over-population. Rapidly mounting human numbers are pressing ever more heavily on natural resources. What is to be done?... The annual increase of numbers should be reduced. But how? We are given two choices -- famine, pestilence and war on the one hand, birth control on the other. Most of us choose birth control.
-- Aldous Huxley

#War #Hands #Two

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

#War #Stress #People

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

#Bombs #Anthrax

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Believe #Belief

Marble, I perceive, covers a multitude of sins.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Architecture #Sin #Perceive

I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Passion #Want #Feels

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Dog #Atheist #Fear

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there. If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am. What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two. In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Dirty #Blessed #Acceptance

No social stability without individual stability.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Individual #Social #Stability

It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Inspirational #Inspiring #Years

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

#Book #Brave New World #Culture

Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Movement #Consciousness

I am I, and I wish I weren't.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Wish #Chaos

The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Eight #Water #Population

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Happiness #Joy #Wheels

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Intuition #Language #Spite

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Form #Strings #Thread

...reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays....
-- Aldous Huxley

#Holiday #Reality #People

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

#Mean #Insignificant

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

#Believe #Mind #Religion

Why do you love the woman you're in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God's own definition of Himself; I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some of her isness spills over and impregnates the entire universe. Objects and events cease to be mere representations of classes and become their own uniqueness; cease to be illustrations of verbal abstractions and become fully concrete. Then you stop being in love, and the universe collapses, with an almost audible squeak of derision, into its normal insignificance.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Girl #Being In Love #Illustration

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

#Hipster #Real #Brave New World

When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.
-- Aldous Huxley

#People

I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Nasty #Said #Jolly

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

#Stupid #Class #May

For 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 religious or political idols
-- Aldous Huxley

#Religious #Spring #Idols

This concern with the basic condition of freedom -- the absence of physical constraint -- is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free -- to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Men #Thinking #Want

The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend
-- Aldous Huxley

#Life #Wall #Ignorance

One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Thinking #Order #Law

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

#Unhappiness #Malice #Folly

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Want #Menace #Stability

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

#Writing #Cat #Novelists

Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds-the given and the home-made, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Home #Men #Two

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
-- Aldous Huxley

#History #Atheism

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

#Meditation #Grace #Soul

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Passion #Civilization

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

#Lying #Two #Relaxation

If humans were in fact the members of a truly social species, and if their individual differences were trifling and could be completely ironed out by appropriate conditioning, then, obviously, there would be no need for liberty and the State would be justified in persecuting the heretics who demanded it.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Differences #Liberty #Facts

To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Inspiration #Writing #People

I know very dimly when I start what's going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Writing #Ideas

A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Community #Identity #Stories

What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Men #Powerless

The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Majority #Logic #Reason

People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!
-- Aldous Huxley

#Silly #People #Lust

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'
-- Aldous Huxley

#Writing #Ambition #Men

Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Guarantees #Statistics #Virtue

Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything, will really do.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Art #Sublime #Action

If you want to write, keep cats.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Writing #Cat #Want

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

#Medicine #Progress #Medical

You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them… But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Sea #Arrows #Mind

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

#Political #Important #Capacity

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

#World #Preoccupation #Property

That’s what the human brain is there for—to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there’s a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Reality #Common Sense #Brain

[...] Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Kings #Holiday #Technology

Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using - you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?
-- Aldous Huxley

#Fall #Brave New World #Water

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. [...] By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Hands #Solitude #Feelings

Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat - and the boat is perpetually sinking.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Trying #Boat #Sinking

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

#Travel #Sacrifice #Vices

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Country #Kings #Truth

I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Morning #Flower #Miracle

A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable.
-- Aldous Huxley

#Real #Love Is #Mind