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Aldous Huxley

67 quotes

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was an English writer and philosopher best known for his dystopian novel *Brave New World*. A man of extraordinary intellectual range, Huxley wrote novels, essays, and screenplays that explored the tensions between science, spirituality, art, and the nature of human consciousness.

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

— Aldous Huxley

Experience

All Quotes by Aldous Huxley

“Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.”

— Aldous Huxley

Power

“Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.”

— Aldous Huxley

God

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

— Aldous Huxley

Technology

“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.”

— Aldous Huxley

Art

“Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.”

— Aldous Huxley

Good

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”

— Aldous Huxley

History

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

— Aldous Huxley

Travel

“Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.”

— Aldous Huxley

Intelligence

“The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.”

— Aldous Huxley

Love

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

— Aldous Huxley

Best

“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.”

— Aldous Huxley

Freedom

“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

Good

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

— Aldous Huxley

Change

“The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.”

— Aldous Huxley

Politics

“What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.”

— Aldous Huxley

Great

“Dream in a pragmatic way.”

— Aldous Huxley

Dreams

“Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”

— Aldous Huxley

Power

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”

— Aldous Huxley

Truth

“One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.”

— Aldous Huxley

Great

“What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.”

— Aldous Huxley

Men