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ALDOUS HUXLEY QUOTES

English writer (1894-1963)

Civilization is sterilization.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

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

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Do What You Will

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, Brave New World Revisited

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Do What You Will

The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Grey Eminence

The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people in a word—these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Point Counter Point

That is the secret of happiness and virtue -- liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

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

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Proper Studies

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

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Ends and Means

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.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

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

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

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, Time Must Have a Stop

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Texts and Pretexts

For 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, Music at Night and Other Essays

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. 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. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Doors of Perception

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

Every change is a menace to stability.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

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.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Collected Essays

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Complete Essays

When the individual feels, the community reels.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

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

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Music at Night and Other Essays

The flower of the present rosily blossomed.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

Home, home -- a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

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

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Those Barren Leaves

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, The Genius and the Goddess

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, Island

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Island

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Texts & Pretexts

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Island

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

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Olive Tree

The social body persists although the component cells may change.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

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, Antic Hay

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

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Point Counter Point

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

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

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, Brave New World Revisited

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

ALDOUS HUXLEY, The Doors of Perception

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

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

ALDOUS HUXLEY, Brave New World


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