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'I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand is the relation among signs.... I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.' 'But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something....' 'What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.... The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.'

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May 11, 2026

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I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Aldous Leonard Huxley

Quote Author: Aldous Leonard Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley

Aldous Leonard Huxley (July 26, 1894 - November 22, 1963) was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Through his novels and essays Huxley functioned as an examiner and sometimes critic of social mores, norms and ideals. Huxley was a humanist but was also interested towards the end of his life in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank .

Other Aldous Leonard Huxley Quotes

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.

Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself As an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.

The proper study of mankind is books.

Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.

Rites, sacraments, and ceremonials are valuable to the extent that they remind those who take part in them of the true Nature of Things.

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of a great sculpture.

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

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.

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.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

The word prayer is applied to at least four distinct procedures: petition, intercession, adoration, and contemplation.

The traveler's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be An actor as well as a spectator.

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 derided as fools and madmen.

Quoting that which was spoken of the young Archimedes: ... [he] was as much enchanted by the rudiments of algebra as he would have been if I had given him an engine worked by steam, with a methylated spirit lamp to heat the boiler; more enchanted, perhaps for the engine would have got broken, and, remaining always itself, would in any case have lost its charm, while the rudiments of algebra continued to grow and blossom in his mind with an unfailing luxuriance. Every day he made the discovery of something which seemed to him exquisitely beautiful; the new toy was inexhaustible in its potentialities.

Beauty for some provides escape, Who gain a happiness in eyeing The gorgeous buttocks of the ape Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.

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.

A bad book is as much labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat, when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife. No man has ever dared to proclaim his illicit amours so frankly as this same tom caterwauling on the tiles.

Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of church going.

I admit that mathematical science is a good thing. But excessive devotion to it is a bad thing.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Facts are ventriloquists' dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer nonsense.

Genius is a child up to the age of ten.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

The thing that impresses me most about this country is its hopefulness. It is this which distinguishes it from Europe, where there is hopeless depression and fear.

The smallest fact is a window through which the infinite may be seen.

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.

A poor degenerate from the ape, Whose hands are four, whose tail’s a limb, I contemplate my flaccid shape And know I may not rival him Save with my mind.

If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.

Every man's memory is his private literature.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons — that's philosophy.

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.

I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that is your own self.

Nonsense is an assertion of man's spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay — in solid cash — the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

Blood of the world, time staunchless flows; The wound is mortal and is mine.

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer.

It is far easier to write ten passable effective sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.

The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved. Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963) English novelist, critic Grey Eminence, ch. 10 (1941).

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

I'm pretty good at inventing phrases — you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you'd sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they're about something hypnopaedically* obvious. But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too. *Training and instruction during sleep.

The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture-ground where all may graze, and where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, the sweeter is its flavor, and the more it nourishes.

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....

Modern man no longer regards Nature as being in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.

Real progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto.

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.

I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I've got something important to say and the power to say it — only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.

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 subtly and feel nobly.

So long as men worship dictators, Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

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