Aldous Huxley Quotes

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

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

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. [Attention]

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. [Work]

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. [Against]

To associate with other like-minded people in small purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. [Friendship]

To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large - this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

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

To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

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

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.

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.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't

Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supra-national totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

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

We've gone on controlling ever since. It hasn't been good for truth, of course. But it's been good for happiness