Top 500 Aldous Huxley Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

356. “Home, home – a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells.”

— Aldous Huxley

357. “Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow’s misdeeds out of yesterday’s miscreeds?”

— Aldous Huxley

358. “We lie to ourselves in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes.”

— Aldous Huxley

359. “Oh, what fun it would be”, he thought, “if one didn’t have to think about happiness.”

— Aldous Huxley

360. “Lenin used to say that electricity plus socialism equals communism. Our equations are rather different. Electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty. Electricity plus heavy industry minus birth control equals misery, totalitarianism and war.”

— Aldous Huxley

361. “Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.”

— Aldous Huxley

362. “And in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer’s afternoon.”

— Aldous Huxley

363. “Grief doesn’t kill, love doesn’t kill; but time kills everything, kills desire, kills sorrow, kills in the end the mind that feels them; wrinkels and softens the body while it still lives, tots it like a medlar, kills it too at last.”

— Aldous Huxley

364. “Porque son los detalles, como todo el mundo lo sabe, los que conducen a la virtud y a la felicidad, en tanto que las generalidades son intelectualmente consideradas como males necesarios.”

— Aldous Huxley

365. “God in the safe and Ford on the shelves.”

— Aldous Huxley

366. “The social body persists although the component cells may change.”

— Aldous Huxley

367. “There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.”

— Aldous Huxley

368. “You’ve got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can’t think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.”

— Aldous Huxley

369. “A man can smile and smile and be a villain.”

— Aldous Huxley

370. “Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s.”

— Aldous Huxley

371. “It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

373. “Can you say something about nothing?”

— Aldous Huxley

374. “Industrial civilization is only possible when there’s no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.”

— Aldous Huxley

375. “Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.”

— Aldous Huxley

376. “There is no bad day that can’t be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet. This is just truth, plain and simple.”

— Aldous Huxley

377. “Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.”

— Aldous Huxley

378. “Words are good servants but bad masters.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

380. “Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.”

— Aldous Huxley

381. “Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.”

— Aldous Huxley

382. “Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.”

— Aldous Huxley

383. “You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.”

— Aldous Huxley

384. “Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t. Whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth or beauty that mattered. Happiness has got to be paid for. It hasn’t been very good for truth of course. But it’s been very good for happiness.”

— Aldous Huxley

385. “They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave.”

— Aldous Huxley

386. “Work is prayer. Work is also stink. Therefore stink is prayer.”

— Aldous Huxley

387. “The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.”

— Aldous Huxley

388. “I don’t care where I’m from, nor where I’m going. From hell to hell.”

— Aldous Huxley

389. “I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...”

— Aldous Huxley

390. “Community, Identity, Stability.” Grand words. “If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.”

— Aldous Huxley

391. “The flower of the present rosily blossomed.”

— Aldous Huxley

392. “If after every tempest came such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death.”

— Aldous Huxley

393. “It is only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber’s craving for position and social distinction.”

— Aldous Huxley

394. “The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface .”

— Aldous Huxley

395. “We now spend a good deal more on drink and smoke than we spend on education. This, of course, is not surprising. The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.”

— Aldous Huxley

396. “Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.”

— Aldous Huxley

397. “Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.”

— Aldous Huxley

398. “Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.”

— Aldous Huxley

399. “But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man- that it is an unnatural state- will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end.”

— Aldous Huxley

400. “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