Top 500 Aldous Huxley Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

203. “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

204. “What wonder, then, if human beings in their search for the divine have generally preferred to look within!”

— Aldous Huxley

205. “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

206. “I am entirely on the side of mystery. I mean, any attempt to explain away the mystery is ridiculous. I believe in the profound and unfathomable mystery of life which has a sort of divine quality about it.”

— Aldous Huxley

207. “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

208. “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

209. “Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.”

— Aldous Huxley

210. “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

211. “Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.”

— Aldous Huxley

212. “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

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213. “Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.”

— Aldous Huxley

214. “The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking.”

— Aldous Huxley

215. “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

216. “Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

218. “If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.”

— Aldous Huxley

219. “The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed. Proficiency and results come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, or combining relaxation with activity.”

— Aldous Huxley

220. “To be a fool at the right time is also an art.”

— Aldous Huxley

221. “In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

— Aldous Huxley

222. “Thought is barred in this City of Dreadful Joy and conversation is unknown.”

— Aldous Huxley

223. “At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.”

— Aldous Huxley

224. “We haven’t any use for old things here.” “Even when they’re beautiful?” “Particularly when they’re beautiful. Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.” “But the new ones are so stupid and horrible.”

— Aldous Huxley

225. “Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To.”

— Aldous Huxley

226. “But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.”

— Aldous Huxley

227. “The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.”

— Aldous Huxley

228. “The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”

— Aldous Huxley

229. “Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.”

— Aldous Huxley

230. “There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.”

— Aldous Huxley

231. “Cleanliness is next to fordliness.”

— Aldous Huxley

232. “Liberty? Why it doesn’t exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.”

— Aldous Huxley

233. “Nothing short of everything will really do.”

— Aldous Huxley

234. “Let us be kinder to one another.”

— Aldous Huxley

235. “This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.”

— Aldous Huxley

236. “Good is that which makes for unity. Evil is that which makes for separateness.”

— Aldous Huxley

237. “Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”

— Aldous Huxley

238. “The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.”

— Aldous Huxley

239. “Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”

— Aldous Huxley

240. “The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.”

— Aldous Huxley

241. “Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness.”

— Aldous Huxley

242. “Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.”

— Aldous Huxley

243. “Perhaps, in the future, when machines have attained to a state of perfection – for I confess that I am, like Godwin and Shelley, a believer in perfectibility, the perfectibility of machinery – then, perhaps, it will be possible for those who, like myself, desire it, to live in a dignified seclusion, surrounded by the delicate attentions of silent and graceful machines, and entirely secure from any human intrusion.”

— Aldous Huxley

244. “It is natural to believe in God when you’re alone – quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.”

— Aldous Huxley

245. “Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.”

— Aldous Huxley

246. “We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.”

— Aldous Huxley

247. “Somewhere in the rain, there will always be an abandoned dog that prevents you from being happy.”

— Aldous Huxley

248. “This growing poverty in the midst of growing population constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to democratic institutions and personal liberty For overpopulation is not compatible with freedom.”

— Aldous Huxley

249. “There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”

— Aldous Huxley

250. “The advertisement is one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms.”

— Aldous Huxley