Quotes by Aldous Huxley
Dying is almost the least spiritual of our acts, more strictly carnal even than the act of love. There are Death Agonies that are like the str...
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. Technology
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
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.
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. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.
Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there'...
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.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
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.
When truth is nothing but the truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there are always ...
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
... that's what living happens to be ... the physiological denial of reverence and good manners and Christianity.... At your age one's quite o...
Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.
The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces and inspirations he has received can make itself felt to other human beings in the white spaces, so to speak, between the lines of his verse. This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in art and nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater.
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
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
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to ...
Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.
