Aldous Huxley > Quotes

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
― Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

“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

“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
― Aldous Huxley

“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

“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

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
― 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

“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.”
― Aldous Huxley

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”
― 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

“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, Collected Essays

“There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
― Aldous Huxley

“I like being myself. Myself and nasty.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
― Aldous Huxley, Texts & Pretexts: An Anthology With Commentaries

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont.”
― Aldous Huxley, Eyeless In Gaza

“I am I, and I wish I weren't.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

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

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”
― Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will: Twelve Essays

“Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”
― 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, Brave New World

“The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.”
― Aldous Huxley

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Every man's memory is his private literature.”
― 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 with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, 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, Jesting Pilate