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)
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
The charlatan is a man who tells you what you already know in words you don't understand.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
A fanatic is a man who consciously overcompensates a secret doubt.
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth.
A million million spermatozoa, / All of them alive: / Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah / Dare hope to survive.
The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery.
The secret of happiness is liking what you have to do.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.
The only completely consistent people are the dead.
At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.
The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone.
The spiritual journey does not consist of arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one's own ignorance concerning one's self and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding.
Contemporaries of Aldous Huxley
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Aldous Huxley (1894–1963).