Top 500 Aldous Huxley Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 10

51. “Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.”

— Aldous Huxley

52. “Everyone belongs to everyone else.”

— Aldous Huxley

53. “In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.”

— Aldous Huxley

54. “Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.”

— Aldous Huxley

55. “Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.”

— Aldous Huxley

56. “Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma.”

— Aldous Huxley

57. “I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”

— Aldous Huxley

58. “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 with pleasure.”

— Aldous Huxley

59. “The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.”

— Aldous Huxley

60. “The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity.”

— Aldous Huxley

61. “Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.”

— Aldous Huxley

62. “We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

64. “Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction.”

— Aldous Huxley

65. “If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.”

— Aldous Huxley

66. “The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.”

— Aldous Huxley

67. “Happiness is never grand.”

— Aldous Huxley

68. “In real life there is no such thing as the average man.”

— Aldous Huxley

69. “How difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one’s voice!”

— Aldous Huxley

70. “We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?”

— Aldous Huxley

71. “I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience? But visionary experience is not always blissful. It’s sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven.”

— Aldous Huxley

72. “Industrialization is the systemic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the thing we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation.”

— Aldous Huxley

73. “The proper study of mankind is books.”

— Aldous Huxley

74. “Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.”

— Aldous Huxley

75. “When life appears to be working against you, when your luck is down, when the supposedly wrong people show up, or when you slip up and return to old, self-defeating habits, recognize the signs that you’re out of harmony with intention.”

— Aldous Huxley

76. “If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.”

— Aldous Huxley

77. “Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

79. “Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.”

— Aldous Huxley

80. “Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!”

— Aldous Huxley

81. “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

— Aldous Huxley

82. “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.”

— Aldous Huxley

83. “Applied Science is a conjuror, whose bottomless hat yields impartially the softest of Angora rabbits and the most petrifying of Medusas.”

— Aldous Huxley

84. “We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.”

— Aldous Huxley

85. “The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious it makes little or no difference.”

— Aldous Huxley

86. “When the individual feels, the community reels.”

— Aldous Huxley

87. “The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is...”

— Aldous Huxley

88. “No Romeo-and-Juliet acts, no nonsense about Love with a large L, none of that popular song claptrap with its skies of blue, dreams come true, heaven with you. Just sensuality for its own sake.”

— Aldous Huxley

89. “Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.”

— Aldous Huxley

90. “Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.”

— Aldous Huxley

91. “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.”

— Aldous Huxley

92. “Most lead lives at worst so painful, at best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principle appetites of the soul.”

— Aldous Huxley

93. “We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.”

— Aldous Huxley

94. “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.”

— Aldous Huxley

95. “If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

97. “Reality, no matter how utopian, seems to be something people need to frequently take a holiday from.”

— Aldous Huxley

98. “Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.”

— Aldous Huxley

99. “Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.”

— Aldous Huxley

100. “The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.”

— Aldous Huxley