Quotes By Aldous Huxley

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

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

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

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

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.

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

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

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