Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Facts do not cease to exist just because they are ignored.
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Death … It’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather's a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Millitary.
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.
People are much too solemn about things - I'm all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.
A country which proposes to make use of modern war as an instrument of policy must possess a highly centralized, all-powerful executive, hence the absurdity of talking about the defense of democracy by force of arms. A democracy which makes or effectively prepares for modern scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
The only completely consistent people are the dead.
To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance - did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.
Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
When truth is nothing but the truth, its unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth.
The silent bear no witness against themselves.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.