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Danh ngôn của Aldous Huxley (Sứ mệnh: 5)

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
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.
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
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.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.
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.
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
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.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
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.
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'
Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
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?
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.