Quotes by
Aldοus Huxley |
1894-1963 , English writer
British writer with an acute intelligence whose works are notable for their wit and pessimistic satire. He remains best known for the novel, Brave New World (1932), a model for much dystopian science fiction that followed.He wrote nearly fifty books –both novels and non-fiction works– as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
| 60 quotes | 1,744 visits |
Quotations
| • | Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. 8 |
| • | An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex. 8 |
| • | Liberties aren’t given, they are taken. 8 |
| • | Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. 6 |
| • | There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. 6 |
| • | Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left. 6 |
| • | The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced. 5 |
| • | But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. 5 |
| • | You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad. 5 |
| • | It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research and study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other. 5 |
| • | We are all geniuses up to the age of ten. 4 |
| • | Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder. 4 |
| • | Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them. 3 |
| • | It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. 3 |
| • | I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery. |
| • | Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. |
| • | To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs. |
| • | The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. |
| • | Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. |
| • | Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. |
| • | The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense. |
| • | Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. |
| • | That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach. |
| • | The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. |
| • | Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt. |
| • | There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men. |
| • | The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred. |
| • | After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. |
| • | For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. |
| • | Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing. |
| • | So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable. |
| • | First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. |
| • | The original scriptures of most religions are poetical and unsystematic. Theology, which generally takes the form of a reasoned commentary on the parables and aphorisms of the scriptures, tends to make its appearance at a later stage of religious history. |
| • | To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. |
| • | Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. |
| • | Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition. |
| • | In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us. |
| • | Words can be like X-rays; if you use them properly, they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. |
| • | The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm. |
| • | A man can smile and smile and be a villain. |
| • | I’m claiming the right to be unhappy. |
| • | We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. |
| • | My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing. |
| • | Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. |
| • | The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. |
| • | The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude. |
| • | If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion. |
| • | The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not. |
| • | Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. |
| • | Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched. |
| • | Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction. |
| • | The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be. |
| • | Every ceiling reached becomes a floor. |
| • | Experience teaches only the teachable. |
| • | Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons. |
| • | Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice. |
| • | All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours. |
| • | A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. |
| • | Several excuses are always less convincing than one. |
| • | If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were. |
