Top 500 Aldous Huxley Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.”

— Aldous Huxley

452. “We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship. Pascal.”

— Aldous Huxley

453. “Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks – already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.”

— Aldous Huxley

454. “Craving for power is not a vice of the body, consequently it knows none of the limitations imposed by a tired or satiated physiology upon gluttony, intemperance and lust.”

— Aldous Huxley

455. “Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.”

— Aldous Huxley

456. “It’s a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is. I think it’s healthy that people should have this experience.”

— Aldous Huxley

457. “The greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better than one should suffer than that many should be corrupted.”

— Aldous Huxley

458. “He would think of Heaven and London and Our Lady of Acoma and the rows and rows of babies in clean bottles and Jesus flying up and Linda flying up and the great Director of World hatcheries and Awonawilona.”

— Aldous Huxley

459. “Wretched, in a word, because she had behaved as any healthy and virtuous English girl ought to behave and not in some other, abnormal, extraordinary way.”

— Aldous Huxley

460. “Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?”

— Aldous Huxley

461. “To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.”

— Aldous Huxley

462. “But a priest’s life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed – a compass, not a weathercock.”

— Aldous Huxley

463. “If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe.”

— Aldous Huxley

464. “Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.”

— Aldous Huxley

465. “The negative propaganda of silence is probably more effective as an instrument of persuasion and mental regimentation than speech. Silence creates the condition in which such words as are spoken or written take most effect.”

— Aldous Huxley

466. “In a few years, no doubt, marriage licences will be sold like dog licences, good for 12 months.”

— Aldous Huxley

467. “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.”

— Aldous Huxley

468. “His intellectual eminence carries with it corresponding moral responsibilities. The greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray.”

— Aldous Huxley

469. “The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.”

— Aldous Huxley

470. “The ductless glands secrete among other things our moods, our aspirations, our philosophy of life.”

— Aldous Huxley

471. “Man is hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgetry.”

— Aldous Huxley

472. “A type of revolutionary novelty may be extremely beautiful in itself; but, for the creatures of habit that we are, its very novelty tends to make it illegible, at any rate to begin with.”

— Aldous Huxley

473. “People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art: because the best people do it.”

— Aldous Huxley

474. “Meanwhile there is still some freedom left in the world. Many young people, it is true, do not seem to value freedom. But some of us still believe that, without freedom, human beings cannot become fully human and that freedom is therefore supremely valuable. Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them.”

— Aldous Huxley

475. “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.”

— Aldous Huxley

476. “It’s embarrassing to tell you this, but it seems to come down mostly to just learning to be kinder.”

— Aldous Huxley

477. “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

478. “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

479. “Some of the greatest advances in mathematics have been due to the invention of symbols, which it afterwards became necessary to explain; from the minus sign proceeded the whole theory of negative quantities.”

— Aldous Huxley

480. “Cruelty and compassion come with the chromosomes.”

— Aldous Huxley

481. “Indifference is a form of sloth. For one can work hard, as I’ve always done, and yet wallow in sloth; be industrious about one’s job, but scandalously lazy about all that isn’t the job. Because, of course, the job is fun. Whereas the non-job – personal relations, in my case – is disagreeable and laborious.”

— Aldous Huxley

482. “These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.”

— Aldous Huxley

483. “By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies – all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

— Aldous Huxley

484. “Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, who have made up in their minds to be content with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.”

— Aldous Huxley

485. “I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise.”

— Aldous Huxley

486. “The consistent thinker, the consistently moral man, is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac.”

— Aldous Huxley

487. “Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.”

— Aldous Huxley

488. “The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in a outward manifesation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions.”

— Aldous Huxley

489. “Community, Identity, Stability.”

— Aldous Huxley

490. “The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.”

— Aldous Huxley

491. “Dinted dimpled wimpled-his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.”

— Aldous Huxley

492. “When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.”

— Aldous Huxley

493. “A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.”

— Aldous Huxley

494. “Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument.”

— Aldous Huxley

495. “Those who crusade not for God in themselves but against the devil in others, never succeed in leaving the world better, but leave it as it was or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was before the crusade began.”

— Aldous Huxley

496. “I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world.”

— Aldous Huxley

497. “The only truly consistent are the dead.”

— Aldous Huxley

498. “In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low.”

— Aldous Huxley

499. “One of the great attractions of patriotism.”

— Aldous Huxley

500. “People are much too solemn about things – I’m all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.”

— Aldous Huxley