Quotes By Aldous Huxley

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

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

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

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.

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

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.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

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.

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

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

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

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

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.'

God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

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.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

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

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