Top 500 Aldous Huxley Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “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

202. “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

203. “In regard to man’s final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead.”

— Aldous Huxley

204. “To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme.”

— Aldous Huxley

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

208. “The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which love can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

211. “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

212. “Cleanliness is next to fordliness.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

226. “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

227. “The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes.”

— Aldous Huxley

228. “There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.”

— Aldous Huxley

229. “Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.”

— Aldous Huxley

230. “The instinct of acquisitiveness has more perverts, I believe, than the instinct of sex. At any rate, people seem to me odder about money than about even their amours.”

— Aldous Huxley

231. “What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.”

— Aldous Huxley

232. “Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born...”

— Aldous Huxley

233. “Contemplation is that condition of alert passivity, in which the soul lays itself open to the divine Ground within and without, the immanent and transcendent Godhead.”

— Aldous Huxley

234. “In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.”

— Aldous Huxley

235. “It’s an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-moron work – go mad, or start smashing things up.”

— Aldous Huxley

236. “That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.”

— Aldous Huxley

237. “One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.”

— Aldous Huxley

238. “The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.”

— Aldous Huxley

239. “Who lives longer? The man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes ’till 95? One passes his 24 months in eternity. All the years of the beefeater are lived only in time.”

— Aldous Huxley

240. “Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.”

— Aldous Huxley

241. “God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.”

— Aldous Huxley

242. “Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons – that’s philosophy.”

— Aldous Huxley

243. “Man must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification.”

— Aldous Huxley

244. “You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”

— Aldous Huxley

245. “Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows.”

— Aldous Huxley

246. “I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”

— Aldous Huxley

247. “Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.”

— Aldous Huxley

248. “Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.”

— Aldous Huxley

249. “Sleep is the most blessed and blessing of all natural graces.”

— Aldous Huxley

250. “If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.”

— Aldous Huxley