Famous Quotes by Aldous Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel writing, film stories and scripts.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't 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.

I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.

If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted. There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

I am I, and I wish I weren't.

I like being myself. Myself and nasty.

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Chronic 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.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

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

All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.

All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy." "Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence. "I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
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