Quotes by Aldous Huxley
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
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.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.
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.
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
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.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Chastity...the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.
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.
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
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.'
If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted
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.
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
