Aldous Huxley Quotes (132) Spiritual Sayings
About the Author: Aldous Leonard Huxley; 26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer, novelist, philosopher, and prominent member of the Huxley family. He graduated from Balliol College at the University of Oxford with a first-class honours in English literature. The author of nearly fifty books, he was best known for his novels including Brave New World, set in a dystopian future; for non-fiction works, such as The Doors of Perception, which recalls experiences when taking a psychedelic drug; and a wide-ranging output of essays. Early in his career Huxley edited the magazine Oxford Poetry and published short stories and poetry. Mid career and later, he published travel writing, film stories, and scripts. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. In 1962, a year before his death, he was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature. See website for more info - https://somaweb.org/w/huxbio.html
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There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. Aldous Huxley
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
Aldous Huxley
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...
Aldous Huxley
The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.
Aldous Huxley
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Aldous Huxley
Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley
Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.
Aldous Huxley
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Aldous Huxley
We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.
Aldous Huxley
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
Aldous Huxley
Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.
Aldous Huxley
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
But the nature of the universe is such that the ends never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.
Aldous Huxley
The effects which follow too constant and intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself.
Aldous Huxley
An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Aldous Huxley
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
Aldous Huxley
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.
Aldous Huxley
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
Aldous Huxley
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
Aldous Huxley
We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.
Aldous Huxley
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Aldous Huxley
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Aldous Huxley
which is better - to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?
Aldous Huxley
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
Aldous Huxley
It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.
Aldous Huxley
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.
Aldous Huxley
Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.
Aldous Huxley
No social stability without individual stability.
Aldous Huxley
The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, tat tvam asi ('That art thou'); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is.
Aldous Huxley
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable.
Aldous Huxley
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Aldous Huxley
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
Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there. If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am. What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two. In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.
Aldous Huxley
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
Aldous Huxley
This concern with the basic condition of freedom -- the absence of physical constraint -- is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free -- to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.
Aldous Huxley
Dream in a pragmatic way.
Aldous Huxley
All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly,those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.
Aldous Huxley
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Aldous Huxley
To be a fool at the right time is also an art.
Aldous Huxley
Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.
Aldous Huxley
Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.
Aldous Huxley
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.
Aldous Huxley
Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
Aldous Huxley
life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything
Aldous Huxley
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Aldous Huxley
The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.
Aldous Huxley
Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.
Aldous Huxley
For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols
Aldous Huxley
One of the great triumphs of the nineteenth century was to limit the connotation of the word "immoral" in such a way that, for practical purposes, only those were immoral who drank too much or made too copious love. Those who indulged in any or all of the other deadly sins could look down in righteous indignation on the lascivious and the gluttonous.... In the name of all lechers and boozers I most solemnly protest against the invidious distinction made to our prejudice.
Aldous Huxley
The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work' with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution. There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.
Aldous Huxley
The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
Aldous Huxley
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
Aldous Huxley
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
Aldous Huxley
The third petition of the Lord's Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone's will be done but their own.
Aldous Huxley
Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right
Aldous Huxley
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Aldous Huxley
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large-This is the experience of inestimable value to everyone.
Aldous Huxley
No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife.
Aldous Huxley
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
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Aldous Huxley
It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.
Aldous Huxley
If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.
Aldous Huxley
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
Aldous Huxley
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Aldous Huxley
One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.
Aldous Huxley
Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren't using - you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?
Aldous Huxley
This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country´s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of W. Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by few.
Aldous Huxley
In a few years, no doubt, marriage licences will be sold like dog licences, good for 12 months.
Aldous Huxley
So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many unexploded certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel they are always right and who attached a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.
Aldous Huxley
Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.
Aldous Huxley
The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.
Aldous Huxley
If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.
Aldous Huxley
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves.
Aldous Huxley
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
Aldous Huxley
The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.
Aldous Huxley
Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument.
Aldous Huxley
Dinted dimpled wimpled-his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.
Aldous Huxley
The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.
Aldous Huxley
If you want to write, keep cats.
Aldous Huxley
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Aldous Huxley
Look with complete innocence at the infinitely improbable thing before you.
Aldous Huxley
Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences human remorses, human compensatory fantasies, human terrors, human cruelties. If all men were alike, all the world would worship the same God.
Aldous Huxley
Industrialization is the systemic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the thing we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation.
Aldous Huxley
Peace is a necessary condition of spirituality, no less than an inevitable result of it.
Aldous Huxley
The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.
Aldous Huxley
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
Aldous Huxley
The greatest triumphs of propoganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.
Aldous Huxley
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
Aldous Huxley
...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.
Aldous Huxley
There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
Aldous Huxley
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
Aldous Huxley
A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.
Aldous Huxley
What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?
Aldous Huxley
But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably.
Aldous Huxley
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
Aldous Huxley
At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men.
Aldous Huxley
Words are good servants but bad masters.
Aldous Huxley
It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with "I," "me," "mine," that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else's.
Aldous Huxley
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