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To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect.

Aldous Huxley

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Aldous Huxley
Age: 69 †
Born: 1894
Born: July 26
Died: 1963
Died: November 22
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Godalming
Surrey
Aldous Leonard Huxley
Seem
Current
Philosophy
Currents
Hopelessly
Everybody
Discover
Inspection
Wrong
Distance
Philosophies
Seems
Travel
Civilizations
Home
Civilization
Imperfect
Way
Prove
Superior
Close
Superiors

More quotes by Aldous Huxley

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All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.
Aldous Huxley
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One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe, when in fact one's just a slight interruption in the ongoing march of entropy.
Aldous Huxley
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How difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one's voice!
Aldous Huxley
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What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
Aldous Huxley
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A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
Aldous Huxley
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The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking.
Aldous Huxley
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The inconveniences and horrors of the pox are perfectly well known to every one but still the disease flourishes and spreads. Several million people were killed in a recent war and half the world ruined but we all busily go on in courses that make another event of the same sort inevitable. Experientia docet? Experientia doesn't.
Aldous Huxley
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A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.
Aldous Huxley
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Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
Aldous Huxley
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Compared with that of Taoists and Far Eastern Buddhists, the Christian attitude toward Nature has been curiously insensitive and often downright domineering and violent. Taking their cue from an unfortunate remark in Genesis, Catholic moralists have regarded animals as mere things which men do right to regard for their own ends. . . .
Aldous Huxley
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In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
Aldous Huxley
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Somewhere in the rain, there will always be an abandoned dog that prevents you from being happy.
Aldous Huxley
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Liberty? Why it doesn't exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.
Aldous Huxley
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Seated upon the convex mound Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays And sings his canticles and hymns, Making the hollow vault resound God's goodness and mysterious ways, Till the great fish spouts music as he swims.
Aldous Huxley
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I am entirely on the side of mystery. I mean, any attempt to explain away the mystery is ridiculous. I believe in the profound and unfathomable mystery of life which has a sort of divine quality about it.
Aldous Huxley
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In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.
Aldous Huxley
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Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
Aldous Huxley
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Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can't help making fly-traps, and men can't help making symbols. That's what the human brain is there for - the turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.
Aldous Huxley
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The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.
Aldous Huxley
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Consider the problem of over-population. Rapidly mounting human numbers are pressing ever more heavily on natural resources. What is to be done?... The annual increase of numbers should be reduced. But how? We are given two choices -- famine, pestilence and war on the one hand, birth control on the other. Most of us choose birth control.
Aldous Huxley