Top 500 Aldous Huxley Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.”

— Aldous Huxley

152. “Chaos and ineptitude are anti-human; but so too is a superlatively efficient government, equipped with all the products of a highly developed technology.”

— Aldous Huxley

153. “It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.”

— Aldous Huxley

154. “Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.”

— Aldous Huxley

155. “No man, however civilized, can listen for very long to African drumming, or Indian chanting, or Welsh hymn singing, and retain intact his critical and self-conscious personality.”

— Aldous Huxley

156. “Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses, kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.”

— Aldous Huxley

157. “God: a gaseous vertebrate.”

— Aldous Huxley

158. “We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.”

— Aldous Huxley

159. “Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.”

— Aldous Huxley

160. “We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”

— Aldous Huxley

161. “I am I, and I wish I weren’t.”

— Aldous Huxley

162. “Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.”

— Aldous Huxley

163. “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.”

— Aldous Huxley

164. “Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.”

— Aldous Huxley

165. “Man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to intuitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.”

— Aldous Huxley

166. “The more stitches, the less riches.”

— Aldous Huxley

167. “Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.”

— Aldous Huxley

168. “The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.”

— Aldous Huxley

169. “In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization – the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in ther interests of the Party or the State.”

— Aldous Huxley

170. “Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom.”

— Aldous Huxley

171. “The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.”

— Aldous Huxley

172. “I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”

— Aldous Huxley

173. “Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study.”

— Aldous Huxley

174. “62,400 repetitions make one truth.”

— Aldous Huxley

175. “A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.”

— Aldous Huxley

176. “Chastity – the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.”

— Aldous Huxley

177. “Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.”

— Aldous Huxley

178. “The third petition of the Lord’s Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone’s will be done but their own.”

— Aldous Huxley

179. “Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education.”

— Aldous Huxley

180. “Several excuses are always less convincing than one.”

— Aldous Huxley

181. “Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.”

— Aldous Huxley

182. “It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’”

— Aldous Huxley

183. “The silent bear no witness against themselves.”

— Aldous Huxley

184. “What would it be like if I were free, not enslaved by my conditioning?”

— Aldous Huxley

185. “Nonsense is an assertion of man’s spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppressions of circumstance.”

— Aldous Huxley

186. “Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.”

— Aldous Huxley

187. “We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge.”

— Aldous Huxley

188. “Choiceless awareness – at every moment and in all the circumstances of life – is the only effective meditation.”

— Aldous Huxley

189. “Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms.”

— Aldous Huxley

190. “So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.”

— Aldous Huxley

191. “It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with “I,” “me,” “mine,” that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else’s.”

— Aldous Huxley

192. “Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.”

— Aldous Huxley

193. “The traveller’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.”

— Aldous Huxley

194. “To travel is to discover that everybody is wrong. The philosophies, the civilizations which seem, at a distance, so superior to those current at home, all prove on a close inspection to be in their own way just as hopelessly imperfect.”

— Aldous Huxley

195. “A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.”

— Aldous Huxley

196. “Nothing – the only perfection, the only absolute. Infinite and eternal nothing.”

— Aldous Huxley

197. “The creation by word-power of something out of nothing – what is that but magic? And, may I add, what is that but literature?”

— Aldous Huxley

198. “Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.”

— Aldous Huxley

199. “For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.”

— Aldous Huxley

200. “Can we unite against ourselves for our own higher interest?”

— Aldous Huxley