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 greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
The desire for power is the most dangerous of all human desires.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
The more we know, the more we realize how much we don't know.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
The human race is a race of fools, and I am one of them.
The only way to be truly happy is to be truly free.
The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.
The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves.
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is to see others as they see themselves.
The soul of man is immortal and imperishable.
Contemporaries of Aldous Huxley
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Aldous Huxley (1894–1963).