Quotes By Aldous Huxley

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.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

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.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

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.'

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.

God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

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.