Top 500 Aldous Huxley Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

405. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

407. “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

408. “To be a fool at the right time is also an art.”

— Aldous Huxley

409. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

413. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

415. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

417. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

423. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

426. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

435. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

439. “An irrelevance, and your life’s altered.”

— Aldous Huxley

440. “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

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

— Aldous Huxley

442. “For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.”

— Aldous Huxley

443. “For the moment the interfering neurotic who, in waking hours, tries to run the show, was blessedly out of the way.”

— Aldous Huxley

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

— Aldous Huxley

445. “Did you ever feel, as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren’t using – you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?”

— Aldous Huxley

446. “The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.”

— Aldous Huxley

447. “Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.”

— Aldous Huxley

448. “Dying is almost the least spiritual of our acts, more strictly carnal even than the act of love. There are Death Agonies that are like the strainings of the Costive at stool.”

— Aldous Huxley

449. “Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.”

— Aldous Huxley

450. “In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.”

— Aldous Huxley