Quotes By Aldous Huxley

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

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.

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

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.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

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.

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.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

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

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.