If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
ALDOUS HUXLEYDon’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking.
More Aldous Huxley Quotes
-
-
The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
If you don’t gamble, you’ll never win.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom…it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
Liberties are not given, they are taken.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
ALDOUS HUXLEY -
To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.
ALDOUS HUXLEY