Quotes from Aldous Huxley

There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

The advertisement is one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms.

An old codger, rampant, and still learning.

Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make their life full, significant, and interesting.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardour, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumour, and survival a thing not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Sleep is the most blessed and blessing of all natural graces.

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

Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

Happiness is something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach.

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

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow's misdeeds out of yesterday's miscreeds?

Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.

At any given moment life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, tending in a certain direction.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.

Every gain made by individuals or society is almost instantly taken for granted.

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.

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

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture.

The greatest triumphs of propaganda 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.