105 Inspiring Aldous Huxley Quotes from English Writer

Aldous Leonard Huxley, an English author and critic born on July 26, 1894, was a notable literary personality recognized for his humorous and gloomy satire.

His most celebrated work, the dystopian book “Brave New World” (1932), established him as a perceptive commentator on twentieth-century politics and technology.

Huxley’s career began after graduating from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1916, despite being half blind.

aldous-huxley

He was the descendant of a prominent family of intellectuals. His early writings such as “Crome Yellow” (1921) and “Antic Hay” (1923) satirized the pretensions of his contemporaries.

Huxley’s later writings, such as “Eyeless in Gaza” (1936) and “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan” (1939) demonstrated his interest in Hindu philosophy and American culture, respectively.

His most recent work “Island” (1962) was a utopian vision, while “The Doors of Perception” (1954) detailed his experiences with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline.

Related: Gary Keller Quotes from Author of The One Thing and Mindy Kaling Quotes from The Hilarious Author and Actress

His thought-provoking writings have helped him to establish as a powerful intellectual of the twentieth century.

Below are some of the most famous quotes by Aldous Huxley.


Best Aldous Huxley Quotes

quotes-about-aldous-huxley

Dream in a pragmatic way. ~ Aldous Huxley.

aldous-huxley-quotes

We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. ~ Aldous Huxley.

aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism. ~ Aldous Huxley.

But the nature of the universe is such that the ends never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end. ~ Aldous Huxley.

aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery. ~ Aldous Huxley.

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.

An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than s*x. ~ Aldous Huxley.

famous-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

Life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything. ~ 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.

Beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king. He gets lynched. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right. ~ Aldous Huxley.

top-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. ~ Aldous Huxley.

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. ~ 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.

powerful-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge. ~ 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.

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

great-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

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.

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Famous Aldous Huxley Quotes

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.

profound-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead. ~ Aldous Huxley.

No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Industrialization is the systemic exploitation of wasting assets. In all too many cases, the thing we call progress is merely an acceleration in the rate of that exploitation. ~ Aldous Huxley.

best-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

Words are good servants but bad masters. ~ Aldous Huxley.

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced. ~ Aldous Huxley.

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.

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.

inspiring-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly. ~ Aldous Huxley.

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.

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.

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left. ~ Aldous Huxley.

inspirational-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

Which is better – to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one? ~ Aldous Huxley.

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

Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. ~ 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.

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.

quotes-on-aldous-huxley

To be a fool at the right time is also an art. ~ Aldous Huxley.

What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you? ~ 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.

Short Aldous Huxley Quotes

If you want to write, keep cats. ~ Aldous Huxley.

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

wise-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness. ~ 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.

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

motivational-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying. ~ Aldous Huxley.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know. ~ 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.

Look with complete innocence at the infinitely improbable thing before you. ~ Aldous Huxley.

ultimate-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder. ~ Aldous Huxley.

A mind that has come to the stillness of wisdom shall know being, shall know what it is to love. Love is neither personal nor impersonal. Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity; it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable. ~ 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.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. ~ Aldous Huxley.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours. ~ Aldous Huxley.

motivating-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you. ~ Aldous Huxley.

What I may call the messages of Brave New World, but it is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda. ~ Aldous Huxley.

But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Experience teaches only the teachable. ~ 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.

meaningful-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously. ~ Aldous Huxley.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Top Aldous Huxley Quotes

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

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.

Pageantry is a visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political instrument. ~ Aldous Huxley.

thought-provoking-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions

Speed provides the one genuinely modern pleasure. ~ Aldous Huxley.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self. ~ Aldous Huxley.

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.

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.

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin. ~ Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

aldous-huxley-quotes-words

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Peace is a necessary condition of spirituality, no less than an inevitable result of it. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Most Inspiring Aldous Huxley Quotes

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking. ~ 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.

At their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and mad men. ~ Aldous Huxley.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. ~ Aldous Huxley.

aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-words

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. ~ Aldous Huxley.

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.

Amazing Aldous Huxley Quotes

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.

Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too. ~ Aldous Huxley.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner. ~ Aldous Huxley.

aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions-words

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries. ~ Aldous Huxley.

I am I, and I wish I weren’t. ~ Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

I like being myself. Myself and nasty. ~ Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well. ~ 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.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable. ~ Aldous Huxley.

best-aldous-huxley-quotes

If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely. ~ Aldous Huxley.

All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. ~ 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.

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.

The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information. ~ Aldous Huxley.

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.

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 thoughts of beauty and truth. ~ Aldous Huxley.

famous-aldous-huxley-quotes-sayings-captions-words

No social stability without individual stability. ~ 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.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power. ~ Aldous Huxley.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation. ~ 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.


So these were the 105 quotes from Aldous Huxley.

If these quotes and sayings connect with you, check out our other posts on Bede Griffiths quotes and Alberto Villoldo quotes.

Share with others!
Chandan Negi
Chandan Negi

I’m the Founder of Internet Pillar - I love sharing quotes and motivational content to inspire and motivate people - #quotes #motivation #internetpillar