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Aldous Huxley [1894-1963] English

Rank: 4
Novelist, Writer

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer, novelist, philosopher, and prominent member of the Huxley family. He graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a first in English literature.

Truth, God, Happiness, War, Age, Beauty, Experience, Freedom, History, Intelligence, Knowledge, Men, Nature, Travel, Attitude, Brainy, Chance, Dad, Death, Dreams, Education, Good, Great, Love, Morning, Motivational, Music, Patriotism, Pet, Politics, Power, Religion, Science, Strength, Technology, Wisdom

Quote	Tags	Rank
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.	Motivational	70
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.	Technology	102
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.	Music	103
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.	Brainy	104
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.	Age, Attitude	105
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.	Education	106
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.		107
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.	History, Men	108
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.	Truth	109
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.		110
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.	Chance	111
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.	Death, Knowledge	112
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.	Happiness	113
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.	God, Happiness	114
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.	Travel	115
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.	Nature	116
There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.	Love	117
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.		118
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.	Intelligence	119
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.	Beauty	120
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.		121
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.	Nature	122
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.		123
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.	Freedom	124
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.	Experience, Wisdom	125
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.	God, Strength, Travel	126
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.	Truth	201
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.	Great, Truth	202
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.	War	203
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.		204
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.	Freedom	205
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.		206
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.	Religion	207
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.	Dad	208
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.		209
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.		210
You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.		211
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.	Politics, War	212
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.	Beauty, Men, Morning, Truth	213
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.		214
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.	Intelligence	215
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.	Age, History	216
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.	Power	217
Dream in a pragmatic way.	Dreams	218
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.		219
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.	Patriotism	220
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.		221
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.		222
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.		223
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.	War	224
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.		225
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.	God, Knowledge	226
Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?		301
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.		302
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.		303
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.		304
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.		305
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.		306
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.		307
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.		308
If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.		309
Every man's memory is his private literature.		310
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.		311
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.		312
Experience teaches only the teachable.	Experience	313
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.		314
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.		315
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.	Pet	316
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.	Happiness	317
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.		318
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.		319
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.		320
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.		321
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.		322
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.	Science	323
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.		324
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.		325
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.		326
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.		401
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.		402
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.		403
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.		404
Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.		405
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.		406
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.		407
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.		408
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.		409
Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.		410
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.	Good	411
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.		412
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.'		413
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.		414
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.		415
The proper study of mankind is books.		416
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.		417
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.		418
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.		419
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.		420
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.		421
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.		422
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.		423
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.		424
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.		425
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.		426
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.		501

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