120+ Famous Aldous Huxley Quotes

Aldous Huxley was a British writer, novelist, and philosopher born on July 26, 1894, in Godalming, Surrey, England. He was a member of a prominent intellectual family, with his grandfather being the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and his brother, the biologist Julian Huxley.

Huxley is best known for his works of fiction and non-fiction, which explore philosophical, social, and psychological themes. His most famous novel is “Brave New World,” published in 1932. In this dystopian novel, Huxley envisions a future society where technology and scientific advancements have led to a dehumanized and superficial world. The book remains a classic in literature and a thought-provoking critique of the dangers of a totalitarian society driven by consumerism and conformity.

Aside from “Brave New World,” Huxley authored numerous other novels, essays, and non-fiction works. Some of his other notable works include:

“Antic Hay” (1923): A satirical novel that examines the lives of bohemian intellectuals in post-World War I London.

“Point Counter Point” (1928): A novel that delves into the lives of a diverse group of characters, exploring their ideas, conflicts, and relationships.

“Eyeless in Gaza” (1936): A novel that weaves together different periods in the life of the protagonist, showcasing his moral and intellectual development.

“The Doors of Perception” (1954): A philosophical work inspired by Huxley’s experiments with the psychedelic substance mescaline. The book discusses the nature of perception and altered states of consciousness.

“Island” (1962): Huxley’s final novel, which presents a utopian vision of a society focused on spiritual growth and individual freedom.

Throughout his life, Huxley was deeply interested in the exploration of human potential and spirituality. He explored various philosophical and spiritual traditions, including Eastern mysticism and psychedelic experiences. This interest is evident in many of his works and essays.

Aldous Huxley passed away on November 22, 1963, in Los Angeles, California, USA. His legacy as a visionary author and thinker continues to influence literature, philosophy, and discussions about the future of humanity.

Aldous Huxley Quotes

1. “Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.”
— Aldous Huxley

2. “Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.”
— Aldous Huxley

3. “All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.”
— Aldous Huxley

4. “Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.”
— Aldous Huxley

5. “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

6. “Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.”
— Aldous Huxley

7. “Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.”
— Aldous Huxley

8. “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.”
— Aldous Huxley

9. “There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.”
— Aldous Huxley

10. “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
— Aldous Huxley

11. “Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.”
— Aldous Huxley

12. “We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.”
— Aldous Huxley

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

14. “Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.”
— Aldous Huxley

15. “Several excuses are always less convincing than one.”
— Aldous Huxley

16. “Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
— Aldous Huxley

17. “I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”
— Aldous Huxley

18. “We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.”
— Aldous Huxley

19. “I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.”
— Aldous Huxley

20. “We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.”
— Aldous Huxley

21. “I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world.”
— Aldous Huxley

22. “It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.”
— Aldous Huxley

23. “I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”
— Aldous Huxley

24. “The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
— Aldous Huxley

25. “The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.”
— Aldous Huxley

26. “Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.”
— Aldous Huxley

27. “A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.”
— Aldous Huxley

28. “The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.”
— Aldous Huxley

29. “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
— Aldous Huxley

30. “We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.”
— Aldous Huxley

31. “Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.”
— Aldous Huxley

32. “We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.”
— Aldous Huxley

33. “Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.”
— Aldous Huxley

34. “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
— Aldous Huxley

35. “Every man’s memory is his private literature.”
— Aldous Huxley

36. “Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.”
— Aldous Huxley

37. “Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.”
— Aldous Huxley

38. “Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.”
— Aldous Huxley

39. “What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.”
— Aldous Huxley

40. “The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love – almost as violent and much more mischievous.”
— Aldous Huxley

41. “Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.”
— Aldous Huxley

42. “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

43. “The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.”
— Aldous Huxley

44. “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

45. “We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.”
— Aldous Huxley

46. “Dream in a pragmatic way.”
— Aldous Huxley

47. “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

48. “The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is…”
— Aldous Huxley

49. “Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.”
— Aldous Huxley

50. “An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.”
— Aldous Huxley

51. “A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.”
— Aldous Huxley

52. “Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.”
— Aldous Huxley

53. “To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.”
— Aldous Huxley

54. “It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.”
— Aldous Huxley

55. “Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.”
— Aldous Huxley

56. “So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.”
— Aldous Huxley

57. “Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.”
— Aldous Huxley

58. “Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.”
— Aldous Huxley

59. “We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.”
— Aldous Huxley

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

61. “It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’”
— Aldous Huxley

62. “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”
— Aldous Huxley

63. “The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”
— Aldous Huxley

64. “Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.”
— Aldous Huxley

65. “Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.”
— Aldous Huxley

66. “What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.”
— Aldous Huxley

67. “One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.”
— Aldous Huxley

68. “Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can’t.”
— Aldous Huxley

69. “A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”
— Aldous Huxley

70. “Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.”
— Aldous Huxley

71. “Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.”
— Aldous Huxley

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

73. “There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.”
— Aldous Huxley

74. “Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.”
— Aldous Huxley

75. “Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.”
— Aldous Huxley

76. “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

77. “Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”
— Aldous Huxley

78. “The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.”
— Aldous Huxley

79. “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.”
— Aldous Huxley

80. “My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.”
— Aldous Huxley

81. “Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.”
— Aldous Huxley

82. “Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.”
— Aldous Huxley

83. “Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?”
— Aldous Huxley

84. “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.”
— Aldous Huxley

85. “From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.”
— Aldous Huxley

86. “The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.”
— Aldous Huxley

87. “Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”
— Aldous Huxley

88. “No social stability without individual stability.”
— Aldous Huxley

89. “An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.”
— Aldous Huxley

90. “Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.”
— Aldous Huxley

91. “A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.”
— Aldous Huxley

92. “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
— Aldous Huxley

93. “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.”
— Aldous Huxley

94. “The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.”
— Aldous Huxley

95. “Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations.”
— Aldous Huxley

96. “Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.”
— Aldous Huxley

97. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty – his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.”
— Aldous Huxley

98. “The proper study of mankind is books.”
— Aldous Huxley

99. “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.”
— Aldous Huxley

100. “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

101. “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

102. “If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.”
— Aldous Huxley

103. “Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.”
— Aldous Huxley

104. “What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.”
— Aldous Huxley

105. “There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.”
— Aldous Huxley

106. “An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.”
— Aldous Huxley

107. “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”
— Aldous Huxley

108. “What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes – ah, they have all the necessary leisure.”
— Aldous Huxley

109. “Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.”
— Aldous Huxley

110. “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
— Aldous Huxley

111. “There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.”
— Aldous Huxley

112. “It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.”
— Aldous Huxley

113. Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.”
— Aldous Huxley

114. “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

115. “It is natural to believe in God when you’re alone– quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.”
— Aldous Huxley

116. “A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.”
— Aldous Huxley

117. “That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.”
— Aldous Huxley

118. “Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.”
— Aldous Huxley

119. “Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?”
— Aldous Huxley

120. “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.”
— Aldous Huxley

121. “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

122. “My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.”
— Aldous Huxley

123. “Can you say something about nothing?”
— Aldous Huxley