Quotes from Aldous Huxley

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtures are of no avail.

What we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

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.

War is often described as a law of nature-this is not true: Among the lower animals, war is unknown.

If you don't gamble, you'll never win.

Knowledge is an affair of symbols and is, all too often, a hindrance to wisdom, the uncovering of the self from moment to moment

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

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

There are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provocation.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

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

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds-the given and the home-made, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols.

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves.

Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you.

At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.

Man must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification.

Man is hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgetry

The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful --because the reproached self isn't abandoned; it remains intact.