Quotes By Aldous Huxley

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

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.

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.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

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

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.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.