Famous Quotes by Aldous Huxley (92 Quotations)

Most ignorance is evincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Aldous Huxley – [Ignorance]

Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

Aldous Huxley – [Thoughts and Thinking]

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 – [Vice]

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 – [Death and Dying]

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

Aldous Huxley – [Bureaucracy]

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 – [Organization]

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

Aldous Huxley – [Prejudice]

People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!

Aldous Huxley – [Lust]

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

Aldous Huxley – [Proverbs]

Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof — that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.

Aldous Huxley – [Spirit and Spirituality]

Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the ''higher life.''

Aldous Huxley – [Intelligence and Intellectuals]

Science has ''explained'' nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Aldous Huxley – [Science and Scientists]

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

Aldous Huxley – [Silence]

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 – [Obsession]

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable.

Aldous Huxley – [Tyranny]

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

Aldous Huxley – [Fathers and Sons]

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science.

Aldous Huxley – [Experts]

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Aldous Huxley – [Pleasure]

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

Aldous Huxley – [Speed]

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

Aldous Huxley – [Equality]