Experience teaches only the teachable.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Experience
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Beauty
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Speed, Pleasure, Haste
Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are – there we are in the Golden Future
—Aldous Huxley
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: One liners, Fun, World
There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Sacrifice
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom, Proverbs, Quotations
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Excuses
The spiritual journey does not consist in arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning one’s self and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one’s self.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Spirit, Growth, Life, God, Ignorance, New, Journeys, Spiritual
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.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Experience
The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Government
Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Health
Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Facts
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.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Dying, Death
Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.
—Aldous Huxley
A life-worshipper’s philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Lust For, Life
Modern man’s besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Instincts, Reason, Intuition
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means of going backward.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Technology
The proper study of mankind is books.
—Aldous Huxley
The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Vision, Prophecy
The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful—because the reproached self isn’t abandoned; it remains intact.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Forgiveness
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Children
Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the “higher life.”
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Miscellaneous, Intelligence, Adversity
It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Reason, Truth, Thought
We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Scientists, Science
The religions whose theology is least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently less violent and more humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism (all obsessed with time) Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism which has gone hand in hand with political and economic oppression of colored people.
—Aldous Huxley
I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Advertising
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Walking
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Prejudice
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- E. M. Forster English Novelist
- Douglas Adams British Author
- Corrie Ten Boom Dutch Jewish Humanist
- Desiderius Erasmus Dutch Humanist, Scholar
- G. K. Chesterton English Journalist
- Robert Anton Wilson American Polymath
- Thomas Love Peacock English Satirist
- J. G. Ballard English Novelist
- Percy Bysshe Shelley English Poet
- George Harrison English Singer
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