Quotes by Aldous Huxley

About Aldous Huxley:

Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer, philosopher and a prominent member of the Huxley family.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Aldous Huxley

Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of...

Aldous Huxley

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

Aldous Huxley

It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

The man who wishes to know the "that" which is "thou" may set to work in any one of three ways. He may begin by looking inwards into his own particular thou and, by a process of "dying to self" --- self in reasoning, self in willing, self in feeling ...

Aldous Huxley

Our civilisation being what it is, you've got to spent eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It's very disagreeable, I know. It's humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You've got to do it...

Aldous Huxley

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously overcompensates a secret doubt.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say 'no' to the boss. But a man cannot say 'no' to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss's favour has been withdrawn.

Aldous Huxley

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. Another question: why do some people remain open and elastic into extreme old age, whereas others become rigid and unproductive before t...

Aldous Huxley

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

Aldous Huxley

The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revul...

Aldous Huxley

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 transcen...

Aldous Huxley

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Aldous Huxley

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

Aldous Huxley

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

Aldous Huxley

Experience teaches only the teachable.

Aldous Huxley

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

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

Aldous Huxley

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

Aldous Huxley

Author Bio

  • NameAldous Huxley
  • DescriptionEnglish writer
  • BornJuly 26, 1894
  • DiedNovember 22, 1963
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Novelist; Philosopher; Screenwriter
  • WorksBrave New World
  • AwardsJames Tait Black Memorial Prize