Quotes by 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.

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.

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

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.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

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

“And along with indifference to space, there was an even more complete indifference to time. There seems to be plenty of it, was all I would answer when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch but my watch I knew was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration. Or alternatively, of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.”

“Soma may make you lose a few years in time, the doctor went on. But think of the enormous, immeasurable durations it can give you out of time. Every soma-holiday is a bit of what our ancestors used to call eternity... Of course Dr Shaw went on, you cant allow people to go popping off into eternity if theyve got any serious work to do.”

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

“I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then, he added in a lower tone, I ate my own wickedness.”

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”

“An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence — either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous ‘embarkation’ and heroic conquest, or else to annihilate the persona and transcend the ego in an obscure rapture of sensuality, a frenzy of romantic passion, more creditably, in the mutual charity of the perfect marriage.”

“Science [is] that wonderfully convenient personification of the opinions, at a certain date, of Professors X, Y, and Z....”

“Only times and places, only names and ghosts.”

“God isnt the son of Memory; Hes the son of Immediate Experience. You cant worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, its hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, youve got to die to every other moment.”

“The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.”

“Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche.”

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isnt nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

“The more science discovers and the more comprehension it gives us of the mechanisms of existence, the more clearly does the mystery of existence itself stand out.”