"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
— Aldous Huxley

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music."
— Aldous Huxley

"Maybe this world is another planet’s hell."
— Aldous Huxley

"Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions."
— Aldous Huxley

"I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself."
— Aldous Huxley (Point Counter Point)

"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 (Brave New World)

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex."
— 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

"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."
— Aldous Huxley

"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead."
— Aldous Huxley

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach."
— Aldous Huxley

"I like being myself. Myself and nasty."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad."
— Aldous Huxley

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

"Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you."
— Aldous Huxley

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

"I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?"

"You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries."
— Aldous Huxley

"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception."
— Aldous Huxley

"Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean."
— Aldous Huxley

"All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant."
— Aldous Huxley

"It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the and that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'"
— Aldous Huxley

"Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited)

"Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"I am I, and I wish I weren't."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough."
— Aldous Huxley

"There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities."
— Aldous Huxley

"The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited)

"Experience teaches only the teachable."
— Aldous Huxley

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

"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 of doubt. Happiness is never grand."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution - then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise."
— Aldous Huxley

"Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything."
— Aldous Huxley (Olive Tree)

"Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster."
— Aldous Huxley (Island)

"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards."
— Aldous Huxley

"The Savage nodded, frowning. "You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows or outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them...But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy."

..."What you need," the Savage went on, "is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
...
"There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality."
...
"But they used to take morphia and cocaine."
...
"Two thousand pharmacologists and biochemists were subsidized in A.F. 178."
...
"Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug."
...
"Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant."
...
"All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects."
...
"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology."
...
"Stability was practically assured."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence."
— Aldous Huxley

"We are all geniuses up to the age of ten."
— Aldous Huxley

"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm."
— Aldous Huxley

"I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery."
— Aldous Huxley

"A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul."
— Aldous Huxley

"No social stability without individual stability."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations."
— 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 (The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell)

"I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin."
— Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)

"Every man's memory is his private literature."
— Aldous Huxley