Aldous Huxley Quotes

Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.

It's dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling.

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.

People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is - just be a little kinder.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

What I may call the messages of Brave New World, but it is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

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. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

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.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat - and the boat is perpetually sinking.

Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.

But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

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 oneself and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one?s self.

which is better - to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?

The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.

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 address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.