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 secret of happiness is to make your interests as wide as possible and let your reactions to the things and people that interest you be as far as possible unconcerned with yourself.
One of the great lessons of life is to learn to be content with what one has, and not to be forever striving for what one hasn't.
The human mind is a wonderful thing. It starts working the moment you're born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public.
Most human beings are not born with a natural capacity for happiness; they have to learn it.
The world is full of people who are trying to get something for nothing, and they usually succeed.
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
To be able to choose, a man must be able to think.
The greatest lesson of life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.
The world is a strange place, full of strange people.
We are all alone in this world, and we must learn to live with that fact.
The only way to make sense out of the world is to realize that it is a mystery.
One of the oddest things about life is that we are always in the process of becoming something else.
The only way to predict the future is to create it.
The more we are aware of our own ignorance, the closer we are to truth.
The greatest wealth is health.
The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.
We live in a world where the only constant is change.
The world is a mirror, and it reflects back to you what you are.
The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Contemporaries of Aldous Huxley
Other Literatures born within 50 years of Aldous Huxley (1894–1963).