Aldous Huxley Quotes
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There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
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Of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently - though as little of one as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society
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To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
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Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
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The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many be corrupted.
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All that the conscious ego can do is to formulate wishes, which are then carried out by forces which it controls very little and understands not at all.
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What the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic.
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An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.
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In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.
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A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world - intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man.
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For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
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History teaches us that war is not inevitable. Once again, it is for us to choose whether we use war or some other method of settling the ordinary and unavoidable conflicts between groups of men.
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'Is it agreeable?' somebody asked.
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To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.
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No Dutch, no English, and therefore no planters, no coolie labour, no cash crops, no systematic exhaustion of our soil. Also no whisky, no Calvinism, no syphilis, no foreign administrators. We were left to go our own way and take responsibility for our own affairs.
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It's a bit embarrassing... to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.'
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One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions.
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From the internal reality, by which I means the totality of psychological experiences, it science actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences-the experiences of sense.
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There are many kinds of gods. Therefore there are many kinds of men.
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The indispensible is not necessarily the desirable.
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I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'
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It often happens that reforms merely have the effect of transferring the undesirable tendencies of individuals from one channel to another channel. An old outlet for some particular wickedness is closed; but a new outlet is opened. The wickedness is not abolished; it is merely provided with a different set of opportunities for self-expression.
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After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
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Who lives longer? the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes 'till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time.