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)
One believes in God only if one doesn't live.
All right then, make me a test case—I’m ready to be the sacrificial lamb.
LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular.
The deepest, the intelligible, of our existences—en rapport with the very soul of the world.
The proper study of mankind is books.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
The world is quieter here and less showy; but it is the same world.
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
A man who has once looked with terror on reality cannot easily look away from it again.
The author of the Iliad must have been tremendously bored with the trojans.
It's good to be occasionally reminded that we are mere animals.
The great thing about writing is that you can do it anywhere.
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Back to culture. Faith. Charity. These are the three keys to the kingdom of heaven.
The only way to escape the corruptible effect of praise is to go on working.
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our duodenum.
The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
My father was a romantic and my mother came from a long line of agnostics.
Contemporaries of Aldous Huxley
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Aldous Huxley (1894–1963).