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Prophecy
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The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.
-Aldous Huxley
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Proverbial Wisdom
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Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
-Aldous Huxley
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Reading
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A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
-Aldous Huxley
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Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.
-Aldous Huxley, Henry Wimbush, in Crome Yellow, ch. 28, 1922
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Recognition
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To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
-Aldous Huxley
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Reform, Correction
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The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.
-Aldous Huxley
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Religion
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You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
-Aldous Huxley
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But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed -- a compass, not a weathercock.
-Aldous Huxley
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Sacrifice
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There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
-Aldous Huxley
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Science
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Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
-Aldous Huxley
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We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.
-Aldous Huxley
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Silence
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Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.
-Aldous Huxley
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Society
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To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.
-Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay, Chichicastenango (1934)
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Solitude
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The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
-Aldous Huxley
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Spirituality
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Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof -- that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.
-Aldous Huxley
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Talent
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There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.
-Aldous Huxley
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Technology
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Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
-Aldous Huxley
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Thought
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Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
-Aldous Huxley
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Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
-Aldous Huxley
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Tragedy
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We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.
-Aldous Huxley
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Travel
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To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
-Aldous Huxley
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Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty -- his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
-Aldous Huxley
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Truth
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Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
-Aldous Huxley
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You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
-Aldous Huxley
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Tyranny
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So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable.
-Aldous Huxley
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Books by and about Aldous Huxley