1894-1963, British Author
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 – [Books and Reading]


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 – [Death and Dying]


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 – [Ignorance]


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 – [War]


A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
Aldous Huxley – [Fanatics and Fanaticism]


A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
Aldous Huxley – [Cities and City Life]


A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.
Aldous Huxley – [Life, Lust For]


A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
Aldous Huxley – [Free Will]


Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.
Aldous Huxley – [Acting and Actors]


After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley – [Music]


Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
Aldous Huxley – [Beauty]


But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed — a compass, not a weathercock.
Aldous Huxley – [Churches]


Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.
Aldous Huxley – [Politicians and Politics]


Classic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. ROLLING IN THE MUCK IS NOT THE BEST WAY OF GETTING CLEAN.
Aldous Huxley – [Repentance]


Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
Aldous Huxley – [Consistency]


Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
Aldous Huxley – [Fanatics and Fanaticism]


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 – [Education]


Every man's memory is his private literature.
Aldous Huxley – [Memory]


Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Aldous Huxley – [Experience]


Experience teaches only the teachable.
Aldous Huxley – [Experience]

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