1894 - 1963
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was a renowned English writer and philosopher. He is best known for his dystopian novel "Brave New World," which explores the dark consequences of a totalitarian society driven by technology and conformity. Huxley's work often delved into themes of societal control, individualism, and the potential dangers of scientific advancement.
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
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 rumor.
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
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.
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 religous or political ideas.
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action in mind.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn't become king. He gets lynched.
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.