Aldous Famous Quotes & Sayings
100 Aldous Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
Partly on his interest being focussed on what he calls 'the soul,' which he persists in regarding as an entity independent of the physical environment, whereas, as I tried to point out to him . . .— Aldous Huxley
How little one knows, really, about anything! And how grossly incurious one remains about so many things, what an enormous number of intrinsically astonishing achievements one merely takes for granted!— Aldous Huxley
Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be— Aldous Huxley
done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of
hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the
precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible.
Things are a great deal better in your part of the world - better, but still quite bad enough. You escape the state-appointed baby-tamers; but your society condemns you to pass your childhood in an exclusive family, with only a single set of siblings and parents. They're foisted on you by hereditary predestination. You can't get rid of them, can't take a holiday from them, can't go to anyone else for a change of moral or psychological air. It's freedom, if you like - but freedom in a telephone booth.— Aldous Huxley
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.— Aldous Huxley
Utopias seem to be much more attainable than one would have believed in other times. And we currently find ourselves faced with a different kind of agonizing question: How can one avoid their definitive attainment? ... Utopias are attainable. Life leads us toward utopias. Perhaps a new century will begin, a century in which the intellectuals and the cultivated classes will dream again of ways to avoid utopias and to return to a non-utopian society, one less "perfect" and more free.— Aldous Huxley
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.— Aldous Huxley
The function of the well-intentioned individual, acting in isolation, is to formulate or disseminate theoretical truths. The function of the well-intentioned individuals in association is to live in accordance with those truths, to demonstrate what happens when theory is translated into practice, to create small-scale working models of the better form of society to which the speculative idealist looks forward.— Aldous Huxley
We should talk less and draw more. (Goethe)— Aldous Huxley
THE MANY FACES OF SURVIVAL— Judy Gregerson
Sunday, August 10th at 2:00 PST
Dachau Liberator, medical whistle-blower, award winning writer, college professor and world renowned garlic farmer, Chester Aaron, talks about the hard choices he's had to make, why he made them, and how it's changed his life.
Mr. Aaron was recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, and received the Huntington Hartford Foundation fellowship which was chaired by Aldous Huxley and Tomas Mann. He also inspired Ralph Nader to expose the over-radiation of blacks in American hospitals.
Now Mr. Aaron is a world-renowned garlic farmer who spends his days writing about the liberation of Dachau. He is 86 years old and he has a thousand stories to tell. Although he has published over 17 books, he is still writing more and looks forward to publishing again soon.
The stupid person's idea of the clever person. [on Aldous Huxley, in Spectator magazine, 1936]— Elizabeth Bowen
![Aldous Sayings By Elizabeth Bowen: The stupid person's idea of the clever person. [on Aldous Huxley, in Spectator magazine, 1936]](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/aldous-sayings-by-elizabeth-bowen-4414.jpg "Aldous Sayings By Elizabeth Bowen: The stupid person's idea of the clever person. [on Aldous Huxley, in Spectator magazine, 1936]")
But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed - a compass, not a weathercock.— Aldous Huxley
The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.— Aldous Huxley
Meanwhile, the self can stand in the way of the Not-Self, interfering with the free flow of spiritual grace, this maintaining the self in a state of blindness, and also with the flow of animal grace, which leads to the impairment of natural functions and, in the long run, of the slower processes called structure. For each individual human being, the main practical problems are these: How can I prevent my ego from eclipsing the inner light, synteresis, scintilla animae, and so perpetuating the state of unregenerate illusion and blindness? And these practical problems remain unchallenged, even if we abandon the notion of an entelechy or physiological intelligencer, of an atman or pneuma and think, instead, in terms [of] systems...— Aldous Huxley
The first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End?— Aldous Huxley
I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large - this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.— Aldous Huxley
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.— Aldous Huxley
The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul.— Aldous Huxley
From the internal reality, by which I means the totality of psychological experiences, it [science] actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences the experiences of sense.— Aldous Huxley
![Aldous Sayings By Aldous Huxley: From the internal reality, by which I means the totality of psychological experiences, it [science]](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/aldous-sayings-by-aldous-huxley-21272.jpg "Aldous Sayings By Aldous Huxley: From the internal reality, by which I means the totality of psychological experiences, it [science]")
Western intellectuals are all sitting-addicts. That's why most of you are so repulsively unwholesome.— Aldous Huxley
As though you could use violent, unjust means and achieve peace and justice! Means determine ends; and must be like the ends proposed. Means intrinsically different from the ends proposed achieve ends like themselves, not like those they were meant to achieve.— Aldous Huxley
Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet.— Aldous Huxley
Grace is the first mouthful of each course - chewed and chewed until there's nothing left of it. And all the time you're chewing you pay attention to the flavour of the food, to it's consistency and temperature, to the pressures on your teeth and the feel of the muscles in your jaws.— Aldous Huxley
With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.— Neil Postman
The boys still sang their horrible song about Linda. Sometimes, too, they laughed at him for being so ragged. When he tore his clothes, Linda did not know how to mend them. In the Other Place, she told him, people threw away clothes with holes in them and got new ones. "Rags, rags!" the boys used to shout at him. "But I can read," he said to himself, "and they can't. They don't even know what reading is." It was fairly easy, if he thought hard enough about the reading, to pretend that he didn't mind when they made fun of him. He asked Linda to give him the book again.— Aldous Huxley
The more the boys pointed and sang, the harder he read.
There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men.— Aldous Huxley
All my thoughts are second thoughts.— Aldous Huxley
The untutored egotist merely wants what he wants. Give him a religious education, and it becomes obvious to him, it becomes axiomatic, that what he wants is what God wants, that his cause is the cause of whatever he may happen to regard as the True Church and that any compromise is a metaphysical Munich, an appeasement of Radical Evil.— Aldous Huxley
Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.— Aldous Huxley
God is Dipa's alibi. Why can't criminals be frank about what they're up to? All this disgusting idealistic hogwash - it makes one vomit.— Aldous Huxley
being of the knower, there is a corresponding— 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
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.— Aldous Huxley
Cynical realism - it's the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation— Aldous Huxley
She lay awake at night, wondering what she ought to do. Life terrified her. She had a child's capacity for happiness, but also a child's fear, a child's inefficiency. When existence was a holiday, none could be more rapturously happy; but when there was business to be done, plans to be made, decisions taken, she was simply lost and terrified.— Aldous Huxley
Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feel that I've got something important to say and the power to say it - only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.— Aldous Huxley
Fuck," he said. I couldn't have put it better myself.— Aldous Mercer
Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.— Aldous Huxley
It isn't only art that is incompatible with happiness, it's also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.— Aldous Huxley
I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.— Aldous Huxley
Reformers should aim at delivering men from the temptations of sloth no less than from the temptations of ambition, avarice and the lust for power and position. Conversely, no reform which leaves the masses of the people wallowing in the slothful irresponsibility of passive obedience to authority can be counted as genuine change for the better.— Aldous Huxley
We can't allow science to undo its own good work.— Aldous Huxley
The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen." The— Aldous Huxley
You remind me o another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reasons for what one believes by instinct.— Aldous Huxley
Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can't.— Aldous Huxley
How difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one's voice!— Aldous Huxley
There are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provocation.— Aldous Huxley
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's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure— Aldous Huxley
chemically pure, I mean, ... not morally.
But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.— Aldous Huxley
what would it be like if I could, if I were free— 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
The fine point of seldom pleasure has been blunted— Aldous Huxley
Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising.— Aldous Huxley
The physician had asked the patient to read aloud a paragraph from the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin. 'It shall be in the power of the College to examine or not examine every Licentiate, previous to his admission to a fellowship, as they shall think fit.' What the patient actually read was: 'An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo, to majoram or that emidrate, eni eni krastei, mestreit to ketra totombreidei, to ra from treido a that kekritest.' Marvellous! Philip said to himself as he copied down the last word. What style! What majestic beauty! The richness and sonority of the opening phrase! 'An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo.' He repeated it to himself. 'I shall print it on the title page of my next novel,' he wrote in his notebook.— Aldous Huxley
One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe, when in fact one's just a slight interruption in the ongoing march of entropy.— Aldous Huxley
Goodness needeth not to enter into the soul, for it is there already, only it is unperceived. Theologia Germanica— Aldous Huxley
Nothing could assuage the secular grief that was your heritage.— Aldous Huxley
It is only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber's craving for position and social distinction.— Aldous Huxley
The most nearly free men have always been those who combined virtue with insight.— Aldous Huxley
An irrelevance, and your life's altered.— Aldous Huxley
Cruelty and compassion come with the chromosomes— Aldous Huxley
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.— Aldous Huxley
Process. It's as beneficial, on its own level, as the hybridization of different strains of maize or chickens.— Aldous Huxley
That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.— Aldous Huxley
New ideas are reasonable if they can be fitted into an already familiar scheme, unreasonable if they cannot be made to fit. Our intellectual prejudices determine the channels along which our reason shall flow.— Aldous Huxley
Intellectuals ... regard over-simplification as the original sin of the mind and have no use for the slogans, the unqualified assertions and sweeping generalizations.— Aldous Huxley
He had emerged from that crimson twilight into the common electric glare with a self-consciousness intensified to the pitch of agony. He was utterly miserable, and perhaps (her shining eyes accused him), perhaps it was his own fault.— Aldous Huxley
But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man- that it is an unnatural state- will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end— Aldous Huxley
Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.— Aldous Huxley
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.— Aldous Huxley
Fortunate boys!' said the Controller. 'No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy - to preserve you, so as far as that is possible, from having emotions at all.'— Aldous Huxley
'Ford's in his flivver,' murmured the DHC. 'All's well with the world.
There seems to be plenty of it,' was all I would answer, when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time.— Aldous Huxley
The boy, called Urbain, is now fourteen years old and wonderfully clever. He deserves to be given the best of educations, and in the neighborhood of Saintes the best education available is to be had at the Jesuit College of Bordeaux. This celebrated seat of learning comprised a high school for boys, a liberal arts college, a seminary, and a School of Advanced Studies for ordained postgraduates. Here the precociously brilliant Urbain Grandier spent more than ten years, first as schoolboy, and later as undergraduate, theological student and, after his ordination in 1615, as Jesuit novice. Not that he intended to enter the Company; for he felt no vocation to subject himself to so rigid a discipline. No, his career was to be made, not in a religious order, but as a secular priest.— Aldous Huxley
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self. - ALDOUS HUXLEY— Wayne W. Dyer
The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture-ground where all may graze, and where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, the sweeter is its flavor, and the more it nourishes.— Aldous Huxley
I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.— Aldous Huxley
There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."— Aldous Huxley
...
"There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."
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"But they used to take morphia and cocaine."
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"Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178."
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"Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."
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"Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."
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"All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."
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"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."
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"Stability was practically assured.
A funny little literary article in the hand is worth at least three Critiques of Pure Reason in the bush.— Aldous Huxley
Henri IV's feet and armpits enjoyed an international reputation.— Aldous Huxley
Familiarity breeds indifference. We have seen too much pure, bright color at Woolworth's to find it intrinsically transporting. And here we may note that, by its amazing capacity to give us too much of the best things, modern technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials.— Aldous Huxley
I think the fact that Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World and talked about anthrax bombs probably helped because at least we ... people had the understanding before the war began that's something we didn't want to get into.— Freeman Dyson
To be a fool at the right time is also an art.— Aldous Huxley
All raw, uncooked, protesting."— Virginia Woolf
(on Aldous Huxley)
Psychotherapy is largely concerned with the debilitating or anti-social consequences of past punishments.— Aldous Huxley
The old self seemed unprecedentedly heavier than the surrounding atmosphere.— Aldous Huxley
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.— Aldous Huxley
You can't be a good economist unless you're also a good psychologist. Or a good engineer without being the right kind of metaphysician.— Aldous Huxley
As a lover or a dipsomaniac, I've no doubt of your being a most fascinating specimen. But as a combiner of forms, you must honestly admit it, you're a bore.— Aldous Huxley
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.— Aldous Huxley
It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.— Aldous Huxley
Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.— Aldous Huxley
Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.— Aldous Huxley
One of the causes, by the way, of the apparent lack, at the present time, of great men lies in the poverty of the contemporary male coiffure. Rich in whiskers, beards, and leonine manes, the great Victorians never failed to look the part, nowadays it is impossible to know a great man when you see one.— Aldous Huxley
We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.— Aldous Huxley
By comparison with a night-club, churches are positively gay.— Aldous Huxley
For their sadness was a symptom of their love for one another -— Aldous Huxley
Can you say something about nothing?— Aldous Huxley
Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.— Aldous Huxley
The only cure for science is more science, not less. We are suffering from the effects of a little science badly applied. The remedy is a lot of science, well applied.— Aldous Huxley
The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.— Aldous Huxley
