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Aldous Huxley

b: Godalming, Surrey, England, Jul 26, 1894

d: Los Angeles, California, USA, Nov 22, 1963

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts.

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"Attention," a voice began to call, and it was as though an oboe had suddenly become articulate. "Attention," repeated in the same high, nasal monotone. "Attention."

"You won't be late?" There was anxiety in Marjorie Carling's voice, there was something like entreaty.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

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.

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.

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, Community, Identity, Stability. {opening line from 'Brave New World'}

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trains--the few that there were--stopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

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 idols.

At the present time, the cinema acts far more effectively as the opium of the people than does religion.

Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed -- a compass, not a weathercock.

Chastity is the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.

Compare the music of the Beggar's Opera with the music of a contemporary revue. They differ as life in the Garden of Eden differed from life in the artistic quarter of Gomorrah.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

Dare hope to survive.

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

Dream in a pragmatic way.

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

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.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Everyone who know how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, multiple the ways in which they exist, to make their life full, significant, and interesting.

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

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

Experience teaches only the teachable.

Facts are ventriloquists 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.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

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.

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions, it is walled and roofed with them.

History reveals the Church and the State as a pair of indispensable Molochs. They protect their worshiping subjects, only to enslave and destroy them.

I bet the human brain is a kludge.

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay -- in solid cash -- the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.

Individual reformation [is] a necessary prerequisite and condition of social reformation.

Industrial man --a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

It had all been arranged by telegram, Jeremy Pordage was to look out for a coloured chauffeur in a grey uniform with a carnation in his button-hole; and the coloured chauffeur was to look out for a middle-aged Englishman carrying the Poetical Works of Wordsworth. In spite of the crowds at the station, they found one another without difficulty.

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 that 'Try to be a little kinder'.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of he answers.

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

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.

It was the day of Gandhi's assassination; but on Calvary the sightseers were more interested in the contents of their picnic baskets than in the possible significance of the, after all, rather commonplace event they had turned out to witness. In spite of all the astronomers can say, Ptolemy was perfectly right: the center of the universe is here, not there.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

Men are not made religious by performing certain actions which are externally good, but they must first have righteous principles, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Most ignorance is evincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

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

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife.

Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

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.

Onward Nazi soldiers, onward Christian soldiers, onward Marxists and Muslims, onward every chosen People, every Crusader and Holy War-maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into death!

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

Ours is a world in which knowledge accumulates and wisdom decays.

People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.

Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.

Phrases like "war of attrition" protect the mind from contact with the particular realities of mangled flesh and putrefying corpses.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof -- that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.

Science has ''explained'' nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.

Sin boldly.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable

Some experience of popular lecturing had convinced me that the necessity of making things plain to uninstructed people was one of the very best means of clearing up the obscure corners in one's own mind.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science.

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

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

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

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.

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.

The only completely consistent people are the dead.

The only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

The proper study of mankind is books.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of childhood into maturity.

The snapshots had become almost as dim as memories.

The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.

The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.

There is a measure of free will within a system of predestination.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self. (from 'Time Must Have a Stop')

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

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

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors, and school teachers.

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

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself. -

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

What we perceive and understand depends upon what we are.

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.

When you don't talk, things get awfully quiet.

Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.

Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Your true traveler 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.