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Aldous Huxley

English writer; grandson of Thomas Huxley who is remembered mainly for his depiction of a scientifically controlled utopia (1894-1963)

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A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Maybe this world is another planet's hell. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
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 subltly and feel nobly. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Experience is not what happens to a man it is what a man does with what happens to him. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Experience teaches only the teachable. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they posses a really effective system of mind-manipulation. Under a scientific dictator, education will rea – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
We participate in a tragedy at a comedy we only look. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
A country which proposes to make use of modern war as an instrument of policy must possess a highly centralized, all-powerful executive, hence the absurdity of talking about the defense of democracy by force of arms. A democracy which makes or effectively prepares for modern scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
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 religous or political ideas. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
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 religous or political ideas. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Classic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. 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. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Death Its the only thing we havent succeeded in completely vulgarizing. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Every man's memory is his private literature. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
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 HuxleyRate it:
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness it is generally the by-product of other activities. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
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. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
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. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of a great sculpture. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Such prosperity as we have known up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
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. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
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 HuxleyRate it:
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. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
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 HuxleyRate it:
The only completely consistent people are the dead. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
The silent bear no witness against themselves. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
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 HuxleyRate it:
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have always been devided as fools and madmen. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance - did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
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 HuxleyRate it:
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. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
When one's ill or unhappy, one needs something outside oneself to hold one up. It is a good thing, I think, when one has been knocked out of one's balance . to have some external job or duty to hang on to. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but now, as yet, intelligent enough. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. – Aldous HuxleyRate it:

A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.

– Aldous HuxleyRate it:

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

– Aldous HuxleyRate it:

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

– Aldous HuxleyRate it:

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 subltly and feel nobly.

– Aldous HuxleyRate it:

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

– Aldous HuxleyRate it:

Experience teaches only the teachable.

– Aldous HuxleyRate it: