"Happiness is like a cat, If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you; it will never come. But if you pay not attention to it and go about your business, you'll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap."
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul. Aldous Huxley
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. Aldous Huxley
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention. Aldous Huxley
A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face. Aldous Huxley
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy. Aldous Huxley
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it. Aldous Huxley
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. Aldous Huxley
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours. Aldous Huxley
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex. Aldous Huxley
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie. Aldous Huxley
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder. Aldous Huxley
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision. Aldous Huxley
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead. Aldous Huxley
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. Aldous Huxley
Every man's memory is his private literature. Aldous Huxley
Every person who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make life full, significant, and interesting. Aldous Huxley
Experience teaches only the teachable. Aldous Huxley
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. 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. Aldous Huxley
Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced. Aldous Huxley
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations. Aldous Huxley
I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery. Aldous Huxley
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power. Aldous Huxley
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh? Aldous Huxley
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels. Aldous Huxley
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs. Aldous Huxley
Maybe this world is another planet's hell. Aldous Huxley
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. Aldous Huxley
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. Aldous Huxley
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking. Aldous Huxley
Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful - if strenuously led - as Christian's in The Pilgrim's Progress. Aldous Huxley
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. Aldous Huxley
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing. Aldous Huxley
No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife. Aldous Huxley
Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre. Aldous Huxley
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous. Aldous Huxley
One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters. Aldous Huxley
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget. Aldous Huxley
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them. Aldous Huxley
Several excuses are always less convincing than one. Aldous Huxley
Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful. Aldous Huxley
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable. Aldous Huxley
Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure. Aldous Huxley
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure. Aldous Huxley
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. Aldous Huxley
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent. Aldous Huxley
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history. Aldous Huxley
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. Aldous Huxley
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name. Aldous Huxley
The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him. Aldous Huxley
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different. Aldous Huxley
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. Aldous Huxley
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. Aldous Huxley
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly. Aldous Huxley
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right. Aldous Huxley
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not. Aldous Huxley
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm. Aldous Huxley
The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator. Aldous Huxley
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen. Aldous Huxley
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail. Aldous Huxley
There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done. Aldous Huxley
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. Aldous Huxley
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself. Aldous Huxley
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs. Aldous Huxley
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries. Aldous Huxley
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength. Aldous Huxley
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten. Aldous Huxley
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look. Aldous Huxley
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera. Aldous Huxley
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. Aldous Huxley
Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty. Aldous Huxley
Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds? Aldous Huxley
Words from the thread on which we string our experiences. Aldous Huxley
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. Aldous Huxley
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure. Aldous Huxley
Type: Novelist Date of Birth:
1894-07-26 Year of Death:
1963 Nationality:
English
