Top 500 Aldous Huxley Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

257. “A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.”

— Aldous Huxley

258. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

266. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

268. “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

269. “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

270. “At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?”

— Aldous Huxley

271. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

276. “Pully, hauly, tug with a will; the gods wiggle waggle, but the sky stands still.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

278. “If you want to write, keep cats.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

280. “Nothing is more dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And love infallibly becomes cold and unimpassioned when it is too lightly made.”

— Aldous Huxley

281. “Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.”

— Aldous Huxley

282. “Wild inside; raging, writhing – yes, “writhing” was the word, writhing with desire. But outwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly – baa, baa, baa.”

— Aldous Huxley

283. “Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet.”

— Aldous Huxley

284. “Industrial man – a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.”

— Aldous Huxley

285. “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

286. “If Men and Women took their Pleasures as noisily as the Cats, what Londoner could ever hope to sleep of nights?”

— Aldous Huxley

287. “Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking.”

— Aldous Huxley

288. “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

289. “Bernard gave his orders in the sharp, rather arrogant and even offensive tone of one who does not feel himself too secure in his superiority.”

— Aldous Huxley

290. “Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.”

— Aldous Huxley

291. “Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species.”

— Aldous Huxley

292. “Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it.”

— Aldous Huxley

293. “To aspire to be superhuman is a most discreditable admission that you lack the guts, the wit, the moderating judgment to be successfully and consummately human.”

— Aldous Huxley

294. “Visionary experience is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of contradictions. Visionary experience is still within that realm. Heaven entails hell, and ‘going to heaven’ is no more liberating than is the descent into horror.”

— Aldous Huxley

295. “To those who think that liberty is a good thing, and that it may someday be possible for people to live in a society fit for free, fully human individuals, a thorough education in the nature of language, its uses and abuses, seems indispensable.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

297. “My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists ; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism .”

— Aldous Huxley

298. “A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.”

— Aldous Huxley

299. “It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.”

— Aldous Huxley

300. “De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.”

— Aldous Huxley