Aldous Huxley > Quotes

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays, Vol. II: 1926-1929

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
― Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
― Aldous Huxley

“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World: Revisited

“I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”
― Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.”
― Aldous Huxley , Island

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
― Aldous Huxley

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I am I, and I wish I weren't.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
― Aldous Huxley

“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 Huxley, Collected Essays

“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Chronic 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 Huxley, Brave New World

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“I like being myself. Myself and nasty.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
― Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts: An Anthology With Commentaries

“...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“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.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“Every man's memory is his private literature.”
― Aldous Huxley

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”
― Aldous Huxley

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”
― Aldous Huxley