Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons - that's philosophy.
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.
We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles and mysteries. Nor did they posses a really effective system of mind-manipulation. Under a scientific dictator, education will rea
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 now, as yet, intelligent enough.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
My fate cannot be mastered it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul I am only its noisiest passenger.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.
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.
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.
Experience is not what happens to a man it is what a man does with what happens to him.
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface.
Death Its the only thing we havent succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have always been devided as fools and madmen.
Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subltly and feel nobly.
A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
When one's ill or unhappy, one needs something outside oneself to hold one up. It is a good thing, I think, when one has been knocked out of one's balance . to have some external job or duty to hang on to.
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.
It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
Such prosperity as we have known up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.
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.
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of a great sculpture.
We participate in a tragedy at a comedy we only look.
Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.
That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
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.
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness it is generally the by-product of other activities.
Quotes from Aldous Huxley (41 quotes)
Search for quotes...