Aldous Huxley Quotes

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

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.

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.

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.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. [Happiness]

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

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

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. [Change]

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 human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.

If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean. [Regrets]

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.'

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 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.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.