Top 500 Aldous Huxley Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

403. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

405. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London.”

— Aldous Huxley

415. “Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!”

— Aldous Huxley

416. “Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

418. “The truth is paradoxical; but man’s passion for rational coherence is even stronger than his love of truth.”

— Aldous Huxley

419. “The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to’t with a more riotous appetite.”

— Aldous Huxley

420. “What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time.”

— Aldous Huxley

421. “Modern man’s besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.”

— Aldous Huxley

422. “In spite of their sadness – because of it, even; for their sadness was the symptom of their love for one another – the three young men were happy.”

— Aldous Huxley

423. “Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.”

— Aldous Huxley

424. “The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.”

— Aldous Huxley

425. “And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else.”

— Aldous Huxley

426. “All crosses had their tops cut and became T’s.”

— Aldous Huxley

427. “From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

— Aldous Huxley

428. “It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.”

— Aldous Huxley

429. “Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.”

— Aldous Huxley

430. “Ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit.”

— Aldous Huxley

431. “Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation.”

— Aldous Huxley

432. “I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both.”

— Aldous Huxley

433. “You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art.”

— Aldous Huxley

434. “The lunatic fringe is more like a Spanish shawl, where the fringe makes up the entire garment.”

— Aldous Huxley

435. “Seated upon the convex mound Of one vast kidney, Jonah prays And sings his canticles and hymns, Making the hollow vault resound God’s goodness and mysterious ways, Till the great fish spouts music as he swims.”

— Aldous Huxley

436. “The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.”

— Aldous Huxley

437. “They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives.”

— Aldous Huxley

438. “Only times and places, only names and ghosts.”

— Aldous Huxley

439. “People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!”

— Aldous Huxley

440. “Marble, I perceive, covers a multitude of sins.”

— Aldous Huxley

441. “Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.”

— Aldous Huxley

442. “Indifference to all the refinements of life – it’s really shocking. Just Calvinism, that’s all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin’s theology.”

— Aldous Huxley

443. “A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.”

— Aldous Huxley

444. “Christianity without tears – that’s what soma is.”

— Aldous Huxley

445. “Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.”

— Aldous Huxley

446. “If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.”

— Aldous Huxley

447. “But truth’s a menace, science is a public danger. As.”

— Aldous Huxley

448. “Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.”

— Aldous Huxley

449. “An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.”

— Aldous Huxley

450. “Familiarity breeds indifference. We have seen too much pure, bright color at Woolworth’s to find it intrinsically transporting. And here we may note that, by its amazing capacity to give us too much of the best things, modern technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials.”

— Aldous Huxley