Quotes from Aldous Huxley

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.

They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now" "But God doesn't change" "Men do though

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

And further, the vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches. Nor is reason itself the most satisfactory instrument for the understanding of life.

Each man's memory is his private literature, and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations. And nothing is more desolating than a thorough knowledge of the private self.

After satisfaction, desire reposes in a cool and lucid sleep.

A million million spermatozoa, All of them alive: Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive. And among that billion minus one Might have chanced to be Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne; But the One was Me.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

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

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

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

It would, said Biran, be much nearer the truth to say asservie à des organes. Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.

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

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

That all men are equal is a proposition to which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.

Why should human females become sterile in their forties while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?

We can't allow science to undo its own good work.