Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.

In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.

Of the significant and pleasurable experiences of life only the simplest are open indiscriminately to all. The rest cannot be had except by those who have undergone a suitable training.

In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled.

The lunatic fringe is more like a Spanish shawl, where the fringe makes up the entire garment.

Indifference to all the refinements of life--it's really shocking. Just Calvinism, that's all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin's theology.

Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

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

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.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

But every one belongs to every one else

Applied Science is a conjuror, whose bottomless hat yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas.

I'd rather be myself," he said. "Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.

Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.

To be a fool at the right time is also an art.

Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument.

Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

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

All democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one person or small group have too much power for too long a time

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.