Top 500 Aldous Huxley Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

259. “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

260. “Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

269. “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

270. “No holiday is ever anything but a disappointment.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

272. “To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

274. “Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time.”

— Aldous Huxley

275. “All our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody’s allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn’t be added to except by special permission from the head cook.”

— Aldous Huxley

Featured in: Book Quotes

276. “Thought of the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny.”

— Aldous Huxley

277. “Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body.”

— Aldous Huxley

278. “Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing.”

— Aldous Huxley

279. “When truth is nothing but truth, it’s unnatural, it’s an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.”

— Aldous Huxley

Featured in: Real Quotes

280. “Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.”

— Aldous Huxley

281. “All democracies are based on the proposition that power is very dangerous and that it is extremely important not to let any one person or small group have too much power for too long a time.”

— Aldous Huxley

282. “The greatest triumphs of propoganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.”

— Aldous Huxley

283. “The best way to find things out is not to ask questions at all. If you fire off a question, it is like firing off a gun – bang it goes.”

— Aldous Huxley

284. “Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are in the Golden Future.”

— Aldous Huxley

285. “Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures.”

— Aldous Huxley

286. “Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.”

— Aldous Huxley

287. “For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.”

— Aldous Huxley

288. “Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.”

— Aldous Huxley

289. “Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory – all these have served, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall.”

— Aldous Huxley

290. “You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It’s one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.”

— Aldous Huxley

291. “Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them.”

— Aldous Huxley

292. “One thinks one’s something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe, when in fact one’s just a slight interruption in the ongoing march of entropy.”

— Aldous Huxley

293. “All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.”

— Aldous Huxley

294. “The investigation of nature is an infinite pasture-ground where all may graze, and where the more bite, the longer the grass grows, the sweeter is its flavor, and the more it nourishes.”

— Aldous Huxley

295. “It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live.”

— Aldous Huxley

296. “Look with complete innocence at the infinitely improbable thing before you.”

— Aldous Huxley

297. “Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.”

— Aldous Huxley

298. “Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.”

— Aldous Huxley

299. “We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.”

— Aldous Huxley

300. “In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.”

— Aldous Huxley