Aldous Huxley Quotes: 22

• Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

• Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

  Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

• 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.

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

  Brave New World

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

  Music at Night and Other Essays

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

• You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

• 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.

  Brave New World

• Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

• 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.

  Brave New World

• All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.

  Crome Yellow

• Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

• I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then,"he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.

  Brave New World

• Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

  Brave New World

• God isn't the son of Memory; He's the son of Immediate Experience. You can't worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it's hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you've got to die to every other moment.

  The Genius And The Goddess

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

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

  Point Counter Point

• The trouble with fiction,"said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

  The Genius And The Goddess

• An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.

  Brave New World Revisited

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

• He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’‘A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,’ said the Savage promptly.‘Quite so…

  Brave New World

• La filosofía nos enseña a sentir incertidumbre ante las cosas que nos parecen evidentes. La propaganda, en cambio, nos enseña a aceptar como evidentes cosas sobre las que sería razonable suspender nuestro juicio o sentir dudas.

  Brave New World Revisited