Quotes By Aldous Huxley

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

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.

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

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.

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.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

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.

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.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

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

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.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

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

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

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.

The proper study of mankind is books.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.

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

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

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