Aldous Huxley quotes

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
- Aldous Huxley

There are things know and there things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
- Aldous Huxley

When the individual feels, the community reels.
- Aldous Huxley

Perhaps it is good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he is happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
- Aldous Huxley

It is not a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
- Aldous Huxley

Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence. Those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
- Aldous Huxley

I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.
- Aldous Huxley

One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.
- Aldous Huxley

Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.
- Aldous Huxley

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
- Aldous Huxley

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

Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.
- Aldous Huxley

Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.
- Aldous Huxley

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
- Aldous Huxley

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions, it is walled and roofed with them.
- Aldous Huxley

Every man’s memory is his private literature.
- Aldous Huxley

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.
- Aldous Huxley

The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.
- Aldous Huxley

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
- Aldous Huxley

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
- Aldous Huxley

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

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

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
- Aldous Huxley

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

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
- Aldous Huxley

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

The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.
- Aldous Huxley

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
- Aldous Huxley

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
- Aldous Huxley

Dualism... Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.
- Aldous Huxley

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
- Aldous Huxley