Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Author
Aldous Huxley
88 quotations
About Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives and poems.
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by Aldous HuxleyThat men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people's happiness.
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.
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
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 ef…
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 …
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Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
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.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
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?
Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions it's walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
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…
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.
There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost…
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
Experience is not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
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.