Aldous Huxley Quotes - Page 19

• The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.

  Aldous Huxley

  Christian, Ideas, Perfect

  Aldous Huxley (1969). “Great Short Works of Aldous Huxley”

  7 Copy quote

• The more stitches, the less riches.

  Aldous Huxley

  Brave New World, Stitches, Riches

  Aldous Huxley (1933). “Retrospect: an omnibus of Aldous Huxley's books”

  16 Copy quote

• The social body persists although the component cells may change.

  Aldous Huxley

  Cells, Body, May

  Aldous Huxley (1950). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Brave new world”

  4 Copy quote

• The proper study of mankind is books.

  Aldous Huxley

  Reading, Book, Study

  Crome Yellow (1921) ch. 28

  12 Copy quote

• Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.

  Aldous Huxley

  Black, Victim, Century

  Aldous Huxley (2009). “Island”, p.69, Random House

  13 Copy quote

• The moral peril to humanity of thoughtlessly accepting these conveniences [of materialism] (with their inherent disadvantages) as constituting a philosophy of life is now becoming apparent. For the implications of this disruptive materialism... are that human beings are nothing but bodies, animals, machines.

  Aldous Huxley

  Philosophy, Animal, Humanity

  4 Copy quote

• You can't make flivers without steel - and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they pratically can't help behaving as they ought to behave.

  Aldous Huxley

  Love, Mother, Children

  10 Copy quote

• Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?

  Aldous Huxley

  Fun, War, Yesterday

  36 Copy quote

• I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.

  Aldous Huxley

  Wise, Angel, Vanity

  Aldous Huxley (2002). “Complete Essays: 1939-1956”, Ivan R Dee

  8 Copy quote

• You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ‘tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them… But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.

  Aldous Huxley

  Sea, Arrows, Mind

  Aldous Huxley (1933). “Retrospect: an omnibus of Aldous Huxley's books”

  54 Copy quote

• Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

  Aldous Huxley

  Evil, Necessary Evil, Chaos

  Aldous Huxley (1950). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Brave new world”

  6 Copy quote

• Nothing is more dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And love infallibly becomes cold and unimpassioned when it is too lightly made.

  Aldous Huxley

  Love, Cold, Made

  Aldous Huxley (2000). “Complete Essays: 1926-1929”, Ivan R Dee

  5 Copy quote

• A poor degenerate from the ape, Whose hands are four, whose tail's a limb, I contemplate my flaccid shape And know I may not rival him Save with my mind.

  Aldous Huxley

  Hands, Mind, Tails

  Aldous Huxley (1971). “The collected poetry of Aldous Huxley”

  5 Copy quote

• I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am, unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied ... In spite of everything I survive.

  Aldous Huxley

  Here I Am, Doubt, Ignorant

  Aldous Huxley (2002). “Complete Essays: 1939-1956”, Ivan R Dee

  6 Copy quote

• Compared with that of Taoists and Far Eastern Buddhists, the Christian attitude toward Nature has been curiously insensitive and often downright domineering and violent. Taking their cue from an unfortunate remark in Genesis, Catholic moralists have regarded animals as mere things which men do right to regard for their own ends. . . .

  Aldous Huxley

  Christian, Buddhist, Attitude

  5 Copy quote

• I am entirely on the side of mystery. I mean, any attempt to explain away the mystery is ridiculous. I believe in the profound and unfathomable mystery of life which has a sort of divine quality about it.

  Aldous Huxley

  Believe, Mean, Profound

  5 Copy quote

• A man may have strong humanitarian and democratic principles, but if he happens to have been brought up as a bath-taking, shirt-changing lover of fresh air, he will have to overcome certain physical repugnance before he can bring himself to put those principles into practice.

  Aldous Huxley

  Strong, Men, Air

  7 Copy quote

• Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.

  Aldous Huxley

  Beautiful, Army, Power

  Aldous Huxley (1954). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Point counter point”

  9 Copy quote

• Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

  Aldous Huxley

  Language, Tradition, Individual

  Aldous Huxley (2009). “The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell”, p.15, Harper Collins

  19 Copy quote

• The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious it makes little or no difference.

  Aldous Huxley

  Religious, Differences, Effectiveness

  Aldous Huxley, Robert S. Baker, James Sexton (2002). “Complete Essays: 1956-1963, and supplement, 1920-1948”, Ivan R. Dee Publisher

  5 Copy quote

• Under the present dispensation, the great majority of factories are little despotisms, benevolent in some cases, malevolent in others. Even where benevolence prevails, passive obedience is demanded by the workers, who are ruled by overseers, not of their own election, but appointed from above. In theory they may be the subjects of a democratic state; but in practice they spend the whole of their working lives as the subjects of a petty tyrant.

  Aldous Huxley

  Practice, Tyrants, Majority

  Aldous Huxley (1937). “Ends and Means: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization”, p.84, Transaction Publishers

  4 Copy quote

• I don't care where I'm from, nor where I'm going. From hell to hell.

  Aldous Huxley

  Care, Hell, I Don't Care

  Aldous Huxley (2010). “Island”, p.25, Harper Collins

  6 Copy quote

• In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

  Aldous Huxley

  Men, Infinite, Distraction

  Aldous Huxley, Robert S. Baker, James Sexton (2002). “Complete Essays: 1956-1963, and supplement, 1920-1948”, Ivan R. Dee Publisher

  9 Copy quote

• Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.

  Aldous Huxley

  Cat, Thinking, Symphony

  5 Copy quote

• ...we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as 'being in one's right mind.

  Aldous Huxley

  Home, Mind, Reassuring

  Aldous Huxley (2002). “Complete Essays: 1939-1956”, Ivan R Dee

  8 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

George Orwell

Thomas Huxley

Ray Bradbury

Julian Huxley

H. G. Wells

Timothy Leary

Laura Huxley

Charles Dickens