Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly fifty books—both novels and non-fiction works—as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems. Profoundly inspirational Aldous Huxley quotes will encourage growth in life, make you wiser and broaden your perspective.
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Famous Aldous Huxley Quotes
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. – Aldous Huxley
Words form the thread on which we string our experiences. – Aldous Huxley
Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean. – Aldous Huxley
The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which love can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time. – Aldous Huxley
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. – Aldous Huxley
Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma. – Aldous Huxley
Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything, will really do. – Aldous Huxley
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful, and we prefer the pleasures of illusion. – Aldous Huxley
At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men. – Aldous Huxley
Liberty? Why it doesn’t exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages. – Aldous Huxley
The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches. – Aldous Huxley
Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too. – Aldous Huxley
If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do is to study the words of those who were. – Aldous Huxley
The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge. – Aldous Huxley
Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive. – Aldous Huxley
Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. – Aldous Huxley
Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction – Aldous Huxley
Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy. – Aldous Huxley
Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief. – Aldous Huxley
Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in. – Aldous Huxley
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
Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body. – Aldous Huxley
To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style. – Aldous Huxley
The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him, the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. – Aldous Huxley
To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance. – Aldous Huxley
Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant. – Aldous Huxley
Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must be continuously on watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness. – Aldous Huxley
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power. – Aldous Huxley
If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. – Aldous Huxley
Hitler’s vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording… Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science. – Aldous Huxley
For the first time in the history of the world, Buddhism proclaimed a salvation which each individual could gain from him or herself, in this world, during this life, without any least reference to God, or to gods either great or small. – Aldous Huxley
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons. – Aldous Huxley
All right then, said the Savage defiantly, I’m claiming the right to be unhappy. – Aldous Huxley
War is often described as a law of nature-this is not true: Among the lower animals, war is unknown. – Aldous Huxley
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead. – Aldous Huxley
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. – Aldous Huxley
Somewhere in the rain, there will always be an abandoned dog that prevents you from being happy. – Aldous Huxley
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know. – Aldous Huxley
Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation. – Aldous Huxley
The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. – Aldous Huxley
Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well. – Aldous Huxley
Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice. – Aldous Huxley
To be a fool at the right time is also an art. – Aldous Huxley
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
Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism. – Aldous Huxley
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it. – Aldous Huxley
People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. – Aldous Huxley
Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched. – Aldous Huxley
One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. – Aldous Huxley
The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals. – Aldous Huxley
In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement. – Aldous Huxley
The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. – Aldous Huxley
Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement. – Aldous Huxley
On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean. – Aldous Huxley
Every man’s memory is his private literature. – Aldous Huxley
All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant-sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder. – Aldous Huxley
I’d rather be myself, he said. Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly. – Aldous Huxley
God isn’t the son of Memory; He’s the son of Immediate Experience. You can’t worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it’s hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you’ve got to die to every other moment. – Aldous Huxley
Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world’s most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors. – Aldous Huxley
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. – Aldous Huxley
If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place. – Aldous Huxley
The third petition of the Lord’s Prayer is repeated daily by millions who have not the slightest intention of letting anyone’s will be done but their own. – Aldous Huxley
Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue. – Aldous Huxley
Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand. – Aldous Huxley
If you don’t gamble, you’ll never win. – Aldous Huxley
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness. – Aldous Huxley
Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful — if strenuously led — as Christian’s in The Pilgrim’s Progress. – Aldous Huxley
The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart’s music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object. – Aldous Huxley
Every ceiling reached becomes a floor. – Aldous Huxley
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history. – Aldous Huxley
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self. – Aldous Huxley
All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. – Aldous Huxley
Real progress is progress in charity, all other advances being secondary thereto. – Aldous Huxley
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. – Aldous Huxley
If we must play the theological game, let us never forget that it is a game. Religion, it seems to me, can survive only as a consciously accepted system of make-believe. – Aldous Huxley
Love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; [but] without intelligence, love is impotent and freedom unattainable. – Aldous Huxley
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
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
All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter. – Aldous Huxley
Men have always been a prey to distractions, which arethe original sins of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system – Aldous Huxley
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. – Aldous Huxley
If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves. – Aldous Huxley
Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you. – Aldous Huxley
Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. – Aldous Huxley
There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God. – Aldous Huxley
People intoxicate themselves with work, so they won’t see how they really are. – Aldous Huxley
If you want to write, keep cats. – Aldous Huxley
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
It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling. – Aldous Huxley
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something. – Aldous Huxley
The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him. – Aldous Huxley
Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there. 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. What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two. In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap. – Aldous Huxley
Our kingdom go is the necessary and unavoidable corollary of ‘Thy kingdom come.’ For the more there is self, the less there is of God. The divine eternal fulness of life can be gained only by those who have deliberately lost the partial, separative life of craving and self-interest, of egocentric thinking, feeling, wishing, and acting. – Aldous Huxley
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
Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born – the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. – Aldous Huxley
The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude. – Aldous Huxley
The trouble with fiction, said John Rivers, is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense. – Aldous Huxley
To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. – Aldous Huxley
But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. – Aldous Huxley
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm. – Aldous Huxley
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies – the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. – Aldous Huxley
Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few. – Aldous Huxley
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science. – Aldous Huxley
Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of the newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights…and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless sub humanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many. – Aldous Huxley
Hinduism the perennial philosophy that is at the core of all religions. – Aldous Huxley
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
People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is – just be a little kinder. – Aldous Huxley
One reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking. – Aldous Huxley
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing. – Aldous Huxley
Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power. – Aldous Huxley
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
This concern with the basic condition of freedom — the absence of physical constraint — is unquestionably necessary but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free — to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act. – Aldous Huxley
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
Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment…. The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium. – Aldous Huxley
Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would one day become a man–a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining. And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create, and, having created, would become the battleground of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitic worm would look at the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry. – Aldous Huxley
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. – Aldous Huxley
Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom. – Aldous Huxley
Words are good servants but bad masters. – Aldous Huxley
What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you? – Aldous Huxley
Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty. – Aldous Huxley
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
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable. – Aldous Huxley
Complete prohibition of all chemical mind changers can be decreed, but cannot be enforced, and tends to create more evils than it cures. – Aldous Huxley
