Aldous Huxley Quotes

Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer, humanist, pacifist, and satirist.
In later part of his life, Aldous Huxley was interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. Huxley is also well known for advocating and taking psychedelics. Huxley's experiments with drugs led him to write several books that had profound influences on the sixties counterculture.
Huxley is best known for his book 'Brave New World'. Huxley second wife Laura Archera wrote 'This Timeless Moment', a biography of Huxley.
Media coverage of Huxley's passing was overshadowed by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on the same day, and the death of the British author C. S. Lewis, who also died on 22 November.


Aldous Huxley

Selected Quotes of Aldous Huxley are:

1. In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.
    
2. 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. Rub it in.
    
3. The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
    
4. After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
    
5. An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
    
6. 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.
    
7. Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
    
8. 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.'
    
9. The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
    
10. And unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.
     
11. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.
     
12. Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.
     
13. So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.
     
14. There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
     
15. Words are good servants but bad masters.
     
16. For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
     
17. Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
     
18. The trouble with fiction... is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
     
19. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.
     
20. Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
     
21. All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
     
22. Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
     
23. 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. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death.
     
24. 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.
     
25. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression.
     
26. Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations.
     
27. That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.
     
28. 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.
     
29. 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!
     
30. The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.
     
31. At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?
     
32. The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious—it makes little or no difference.