Top 500 Aldous Huxley Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “The fact that people are shocked is the best proof that they need shocking.”

— Aldous Huxley

302. “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

303. “Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.”

— Aldous Huxley

304. “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

305. “Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof – that’s a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.”

— Aldous Huxley

306. “That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.”

— Aldous Huxley

307. “The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.”

— Aldous Huxley

308. “Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.”

— Aldous Huxley

309. “Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet’s irreplaceable capital.”

— Aldous Huxley

310. “Goodness needeth not to enter into the soul, for it is there already, only it is unperceived. Theologia Germanica.”

— Aldous Huxley

311. “Religion is always a patron of the arts, but its taste is by no means impeccable.”

— Aldous Huxley

312. “Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible.”

— Aldous Huxley

313. “It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.”

— Aldous Huxley

314. “I’m sick. I’ve eaten civilisation and I’m sick.”

— Aldous Huxley

315. “When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she – or he, of course, as the case may be – must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.”

— Aldous Huxley

316. “But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.”

— Aldous Huxley

317. “Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.”

— Aldous Huxley

318. “The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed.”

— Aldous Huxley

319. “It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living.”

— Aldous Huxley

320. “Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. That’s one of the things I try to teach my students – how to write piercingly. But what on earth’s the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing – you know, like the very hardest X-rays – when you’re writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing?”

— Aldous Huxley

321. “The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful – because the reproached self isn’t abandoned; it remains intact.”

— Aldous Huxley

322. “One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments.”

— Aldous Huxley

323. “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons-that’s philosophy. People believe in God because they’ve been conditioned to believe in God.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

325. “Champagne has the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife.”

— Aldous Huxley

326. “What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.”

— Aldous Huxley

327. “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

328. “What fun would it be if one didn’t have to think about happiness.”

— Aldous Huxley

329. “You all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford’s: History is bunk.”

— Aldous Huxley

330. “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

331. “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

332. “Truth’s a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it’s been beneficent.”

— Aldous Huxley

333. “The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.”

— Aldous Huxley

334. “Five minutes later roots and fruits were abolished; the flower of the present rosily blossomed.”

— Aldous Huxley

335. “It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes – make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

337. “Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

339. “All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

341. “Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.”

— Aldous Huxley

342. “Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising.”

— Aldous Huxley

343. “We can’t allow science to undo its own good work.”

— Aldous Huxley

344. “Degrade him from what position? As a happy, hard-working, goods-consuming citizen he’s perfect. Of course, if you choose some other standard than ours, then perhaps you might say he was degraded. But you’ve got to stick to one set of postulates. You can’t play Electro-magnetic Golf according to rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

346. “Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds-the given and the home-made, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols.”

— Aldous Huxley

347. “When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.”

— Aldous Huxley

348. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley