Aldous Huxley Quotes

In history, as in traveling, men usually see only what they already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history, who do not bring much with them to its study.

What a man sees depends on what he looks at and what his previous experience has taught him to see.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Men willingly believe what they wish.

Man associates ideas not according to logic or verifiable exactitude, but according to his pleasure and interests. It is for this reason that most truths are nothing but prejudices.

We never stop to consider that our beliefs are only a relative truth that's always going to be distorted by all the knowledge we have stored in our memory.

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.

We don’t usually know how to see beyond our presuppositions (the reason, of course, why so many false views of indubitable past geniuses seem so strange to us today.)

We believe what we want to believe, what we like to believe, what suits our prejudices and fuels our passions.

No work of history can ever escape its own time...we are all influenced by what we read and what we experience.

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices.

A mind devoid of prepossessions is likely to be devoid of all mental furniture. And the historian who thinks that he can clean his mind as he would a slate with a wet sponge, is ignorant of the simplest facts of mental life.

Theory can blind observation.

Nobody ever lived in the past.

Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences.

We live in reference to past experience and not to future events, however inevitable.

Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child.

Reading history while you make history can teach you a lot.

In critical moments, men sometimes see exactly what they wish to see.

If history teaches anything, it teaches humility.

People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said.

Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say that it is correct. If it is not, we say it is incorrect. In either case, we learn nothing.

To look back into the past only makes sense if it serves the future.

There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us.