Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

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

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

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

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.

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 rumour.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay, in solid cash, the tribute which Philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

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.

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and madmen.

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.

So long as men worship dictators, Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable.

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

A million million spermatozoa, All of them alive: Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.

Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.