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Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley Quotes

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Famous Aldous Huxley Quotes

“When I do something wrong,' he said, 'or merely stupid, I find it very useful to draw up-not exactly a balance sheet; no, it's more like a genealogy, if you see what I mean, a family tree of the offence. Who or what were its parents, ancestors, col- laterals? What are likely to be its descendants-in my own life and other people's? It's surprising how far a little honest research will take one. Down into the rat-holes of one's own character. Back into past history. Out into the world around one. Forward into possible consequences. It makes one realize that nothing one does is unimportant and nothing wholly private.”

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Author:Aldous Huxley
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“The religions whose theology is least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently less violent and more humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism (all obsessed with time) Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism which has gone hand in hand with political and economic oppression of colored people.”

PeopleHas BeensWarHandsPoliticalReligiousChristianityPracticeGoneEconomicEventsBuddhismHolyConcernedEternityViolentTheologyOppressionObsessedHinduismConsistentlyImperialismJudaismHumaneHand In HandHoly WarProselytizingHinduism And Buddhism
Author:Aldous Huxley
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“The inconveniences and horrors of the pox are perfectly well known to every one; but still the disease flourishes and spreads. Several million people were killed in a recent war and half the world ruined; but we all busily go on in courses that make another event of the same sort inevitable. Experientia docet? Experientia doesn't.”

PeopleWorldWellsStillsWarCoursesHalfKnownMillionsLearningEventsGoes OnHorrorDiseaseExperienceSpreadInevitableWell KnownRuinedFutilityInconveniencePox
Book:Antic Hay and the Gioconda Smile
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“What's the greatest enemy of Christianity to-day? Frozen meat. In the past only members of the upper classes were thoroughly sceptical, despairing, negative. Why? Among other reasons, because they were the only people who could afford to eat too much meat. Now there's cheap Canterbury lamb and Argentine chilled beef. Even the poor can afford to poison themselves into complete scepticism and despair.”

PeopleReasonPastPoorChristianityEnemyClassToo MuchMembersDespairNegativeMeatPoisonSkepticismFrozenLambsBeefUpper ClassScepticismChilledCanterbury
Book:The collected works of Aldous Huxley
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“At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.”

PeopleWorldMomentsFactsBodyEyePainSufferingThreeEnjoyAirFeetHorrorHundredRateCornersSecondsSympathyScreamApathyDecayEnjoy LifeCrushedElevenDistressingCorners Of The World
Author:Aldous Huxley
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“What drivel it all is!... A string of words called religion. Another string of words called philosophy. Half a dozen other stringscalled political ideals. And all the words either ambiguous or meaningless. And people getting so excited about them they'll murder their neighbours for using a word they don't happen to like. A word that probably doesn't mean as much as a good belch. Just a noise without even the excuse of gas on the stomach.”

PeopleMeanPhilosophyHappensPoliticalBeliefHalfViolenceIdealsMurderExcuseExcitedNoiseIdeologyGasStringsStomachMeaninglessDozenNeighbourAmbiguousDrivel
Book:After Many a Summer
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“The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.”

PeopleWorldWantBookArtistHouseForgetDifficultyUniversityIntelligenceContemporaryRealizationGrotesqueInefficiency
Book:The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Point counter point
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“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."”

PeopleIfsFeelsBelieveWellsHas BeensSaidReasonPhilosophyMightAsksNaturalFindingsFellowsInstinctDefinedBelieve In GodSavagesInterruptedTrousersBrave New World FreedomControllersZippers
Author:Aldous Huxley
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“The place is good. How good, one must have circumnavigated the globe to discover. Why not stay? Take root? But roots are chains. I have a terror of losing my freedom. Free, without ties, unpossessed by any possessions, free to do as one will, to go at a moment's notice wherever the fancy may suggest--it is good. But so is this place. Might it not be better? To gain freedom one sacrifices something [...] and all that these things and people signify. One sacrifices something--for a greater gain in knowledge, in understanding, in intensified living? I sometimes wonder.”

PeopleMaySometimesMomentsMightUnderstandingWonderGreaterSacrificeLosingGainsRootsTerrorPossessionChainsTiesFancyWhy NotGlobes
Book:The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Point counter point
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“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.”

PeopleKindFactsNextSpeakEnjoyLibertyTakenGenerationsTearsMethodConcentrationCampsDictatorshipNext GenerationNew World OrderWorld OrderServitudeConcentration CampNwoPainless
Author:Aldous Huxley
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“Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence.”

PeopleWayLongTwoRealMomentsDesireSidesSilencePiecesLike YouConflictArgumentTwentiesGoldenInternalsGoddessTrapsSuperficialDiscretionOne PieceOlympianMethodistsTwenty TwoInternal ConflictWoodpeckers
Author:Aldous Huxley
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“Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.”

PeopleChildrenIdeasStatesAbleUniverseInterestHalfOpinionKnowingWifeIgnoranceBrokenPhilosophicalProfoundBusySensualityNot KnowingComplaintsMixturesToo BusyReedsPintsInterest In Others
Book:Great Short Works of Aldous Huxley
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“I used to think I had no will to power. Now I perceive that I vented it on thoughts, rather than people. Conquering an unknown province of knowledge. Getting the better of a problem. Forcing ideas to associate or come apart. Bullying recalcitrant words to assume a certain pattern. All the fun of being a dictator without any risks and responsibilities.”

PeopleThinkingIdeasProblemUsedCertainFunResponsibilityRiskAssumingPatternsConquerPerceiveBullyingDictatorAssociatesWill PowerProvincesRecalcitrant
Book:The collected works of Aldous Huxley
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“And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”

PeopleWorldHappinessPoliticalPoliticsSocialSecretDestinyVirtueDirectorsAimBraveNew WorldConditioningBrave New WorldBrave New World HappinessBrave New World FreedomBrave New World CharacterVirtue And HappinessBrave New World TechnologyBrave New World LeninaBrave New World Consumerism
Book:Retrospect: an omnibus of Aldous Huxley's books
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“It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it's healthy that people should have this experience.”

PeopleThinkingShouldUniverseRealizingHealthyShould HaveOur TimeDull
Book:Moksha: Aldous Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience
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“Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.”

PeopleIfsThinkingKnowsPersonsDiesThreeCoursesDifferencesAnimalAcceptingKnowingDyingDrinkEatingOrdinaryUniversalDrinkingRefuseDuesPrimariesManifestationEnlightenedOrdinary PeopleUniversal Life
Author:Aldous Huxley
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“Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.”

PeopleGivingHas BeensRealityIndividualBeliefLanguageBornRecordsAwarenessHumilityCommunicationConceptsTraditionExperienceVictimAccessDataBeneficiariesDoors Of Perception
Author:Aldous Huxley
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