Famous Quotes by Aldous Huxley (92 Quotations)

Facts are ventriloquists dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.

Aldous Huxley – [Facts]

Facts don't cease to exist because they are ignored.

Aldous Huxley – [Facts]

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 – [Experience]

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.

Aldous Huxley – [Goodness]

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 – [Truth]

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

Aldous Huxley – [Happiness]

I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

Aldous Huxley – [Advertising]

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

Aldous Huxley – [Fame]

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Aldous Huxley – [Politicians and Politics]

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay — in solid cash — the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

Aldous Huxley – [Patronage]

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution — then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.

Aldous Huxley – [Drugs]

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 – [Death and Dying]

Industrial man –a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.

Aldous Huxley – [Work]

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

Aldous Huxley – [Murder]

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

Aldous Huxley – [Fiction]

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

Aldous Huxley – [Work]

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Aldous Huxley – [Mistakes]

Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.

Aldous Huxley – [Intelligence and Intellectuals]

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

Aldous Huxley – [Morality]

Most human beings have an infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Aldous Huxley – [Apathy]