Aldous Huxley quote: "The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it improves conduct. It does little, however, to alter character and nothing of itself to modify consciousness."

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situati...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in whic...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

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

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Every man's memory is his private literature.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and fur...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at th...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now"
"But God doesn't chan...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

No social stability without individual stability.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

I am I, and I wish I weren't.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want good...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resou...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's sou...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accompli...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a m...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Industrial man --a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron whe...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manne...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirte...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes, and thanks to words, we have sunk to th...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

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

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

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

All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to ment...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Every man's memory is his private literature.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or le...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those wh...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give plea...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Most ignorance is evincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Most ignorance is invincible ignorance.We don't know because we don't want to know.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer th...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands a...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

But no language is perfect, no vocabulary is adequate to the wealth of the given universe, no patter...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to ma...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emot...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality a...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

An atheist is a person who has no invisible means of support
ALDOUS HUXLEY

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay -- in solid cash -- the tribute which philistinism...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to k...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of wor...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solit...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of p...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!
ALDOUS HUXLEY

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Facts are ventriloquist's dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of w...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Experience teaches only the teachable.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the so...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever gi...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same s...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however pa...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Classic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behav...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the k...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on t...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of t...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-th...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The spiritual journey does not consist of arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of gen...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing cha...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do i...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the of...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profoun...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the d...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The only completely consistent people are the dead.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. D...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

But a priest's life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed -- a compas...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever gi...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in whic...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Facts don't cease to exist because they are ignored.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Forgetting that several excuses are always less convincing than one.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often su...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof -- that's a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-g...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, ex...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions, it is walled and roofed with them
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given hi...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - h...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

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

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, how...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

I'm afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

But the nature of the universe is such that the ends never justify the means. On the contrary, the m...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a sk...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nati...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Meanwhile, the self can stand in the way of the Not-Self, interfering with the free flow of spiritua...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Pain was a fascinating horror
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. An...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can neve...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distres...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are no...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing w...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Every man with a little leisure and enough money for railway tickets, every man, indeed, who knows h...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the star...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Chastity: the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

A country which proposes to make use of modern war as an instrument of policy must possess a highly ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

People are much too solemn about things - I'm all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psy...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is on...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in t...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty -- h...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of o...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Death Its the only thing we havent succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

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

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it cla...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motiva...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a v...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them ...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cea...
ALDOUS HUXLEY

There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol....
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Words from the thread on which we string our experiences.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it improves conduct. It does little, however, to alter character and nothing of itself to modify consciousness.

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Aldous Huxley

The best that can be said for ritualistic legalism is that it improves conduct. It does little, however, to alter character and nothing of itself to modify consciousness.

Aldous Huxley

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