Aldous Huxley
Brave New World, visionary dystopian novelist
Most quoted
"As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator (unless he is so foolish as to provoke resentment by forbidding it) will do well to encourage that freedom. In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope, the freedom to indulge in uninhibited sex will help reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their lot."
— from Brave New World Revisited, 1958
"The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend."
— from The Doors of Perception, 1954
"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 then dismiss the matter from your mind. No amount of brooding on the past will alter what has happened. But by brooding on the past you can ruin the present and the future. These are the things to which one should pay attention."
— from Brave New World, 1932
All quotes by Aldous Huxley (265)
The more we are taught, the less we learn.
The human race is a race of slaves, and the only way to be free is to be a master of yourself.
The highest good is to be found in the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness.
The more you know, the more you realize you don't know.
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think.
The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
The world is a parable, and the meaning of the parable is the meaning of the world.
We are all of us in the power of the Great Other, and the Great Other is in the power of us all.
The more you know, the more you see, the more you feel, the more you are.
The desire for power is the desire to escape from the human condition.
The fully developed human being is one who has learned to live in the present, to be aware of the present, to be grateful for the present.
The world is not a problem; the problem is our attitude toward the world.
To be free, we must be able to choose. To choose, we must be able to know. To know, we must be able to see.
Beauty is a manifestation of the divine.
The human being is a being in search of meaning.
Art is simply a right method of making things.
The human race is a single organism, and we are all cells in that organism.
The aim of life is to be fully alive.
Death is not the end, but a transformation.
Contemporaries of Aldous Huxley
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Aldous Huxley (1894–1963).