Looking for inspirational quotes by Aldous Huxley? We have rounded up the best collection of Aldous Huxley quotes, sayings, wishes, and captions (with images and pictures) about life, future, technology, and freedom that will motivate you.
Huxley remains best known for one novel, Brave New World (1932), a model for much dystopian science fiction that followed.
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English novelist, intellectual, philosopher, and prolific writer who rose to fame in the 20th century. Huxley belonged to an influential family in England. He studied at Eton College and then at Oxford University, before making a career in writing.
As a university student, he published short stories and poetry, and also edited Oxford Poetry, a literary magazine. Later, he also contributed to British Vogue and Vanity Fair Magazines.
Huxley’s most famous works as a novelist include ‘The Perennial Philosophy’, ‘Point Counter Point’, and ‘Island’. Huxley rose to prominence after the success of his fifth novel ‘Brave New World’, a dystopian fiction.
He was also a well-renowned non-fiction writer and one of his well-known works is the book ‘The Doors Of Perception’ which focuses on mysticism and universalism.
Huxley was an avid travel writer and also worked on movie scripts. Besides having a career in writing, he was also a humanist and pacifist. Huxley moved with his family to Hollywood in 1938 and lived in the U.S. until his death in 1963.
These famous sayings by Aldous Huxley throw light on his thoughts about life, God, history, and more.
These inspiraitonal quotes of Aldous Huxley are divided into these sections;
- Top 10 Aldous Huxley Quotes
- Famous Aldous Huxley Quotes
- Best Quotes By Aldous Huxley
- Aldous Huxley Quotes From Brave New World
Top 10 Aldous Huxley Quotes
- “Dream in a pragmatic way.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” – Aldous Huxley
- “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.” – Aldous Huxley
- “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” – Aldous Huxley
- “My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.” – Aldous Huxley
- “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” – Aldous Huxley
- “There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” – Aldous Huxley
- “The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.” – 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
Famous Aldous Huxley Quotes
- “Pain was a fascinating horror.” – Aldous Huxley
- “I like being myself. Myself and nasty.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Liberties aren’t given, they are taken.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Experience teaches only the teachable.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.” – Aldous Huxley
- “We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Every man’s memory is his private literature.” – Aldous Huxley
- “No social stability without individual stability.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Words form the thread on which we string our experiences.” – Aldous Huxley
- “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.” – Aldous Huxley
- “All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.” – Aldous Huxley
- “To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.” – Aldous Huxley
- “I’d rather be myself,” he said. “Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.” – Aldous Huxley
- “I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.” – Aldous Huxley
- “An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” – Aldous Huxley
- “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.” – 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
- “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” – Aldous Huxley
- “…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.” – 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
- “The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.” – Aldous Huxley
- “That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.” – Aldous Huxley
- “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” – Aldous Huxley
- “…reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays….” – 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
- “Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.” – Aldous Huxley
- “These are the sort of things people ought to look at. Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves.” – Aldous Huxley
- “I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then,” he added in a lower tone, “I ate my own wickedness.” – 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
- “For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.” – 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
- “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
- “It is possible to make people contented with their servitude. You can provide them with endless amounts of distraction and propaganda.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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
- “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
- “Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.” – 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
- “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
- “Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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
- “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
- “Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.” – Aldous Huxley
- “… the greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.” – Aldous Huxley
- “The spiritual journey does not consist of arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning one’s self and life, and gradual growth of that understanding, which begins a spiritual awakening. The finding of God is coming to one’s self.” – Aldous Huxley
- “This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country´s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of W. Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by few.” – 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
- “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
- “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
Best Quotes By Aldous Huxley
- “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.” – Aldous Huxley
- “… one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma.” – Aldous Huxley
- “An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.” – Aldous Huxley
- “We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.” – Aldous Huxley
- “The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning, truth and beauty can’t.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.” – Aldous Huxley
- “…two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.” – 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
- “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
- “What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?” – Aldous Huxley
- “The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Did you eat something that didn’t agree with you?” asked Bernard. The Savage nodded. “I ate civilization.” – Aldous Huxley
- “People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.” – Aldous Huxley
- “A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.” – Aldous Huxley
- “We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.” – Aldous Huxley
- “So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.” – Aldous Huxley
- “The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace, The prurient ape’s defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.” – Aldous Huxley
- “The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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
- “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
- “Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.” – Aldous Huxley
- “I can sympathize with people’s pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.” – 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
- “The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.” – 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
- “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
- “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
- “Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson–paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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
- “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
- “All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in subsituting 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
- “So now you can let go, my darling…Let go…Let go of this poor old body. You don’t need it anymore. Let it fall away from you. Leave it lying there like a pile of worn-out clothes…Go on, my darling, go on into the Light, into the peace, into the living peace of the Clear Light.” – Aldous Huxley
- “The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity.” – Aldous Huxley
- “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’ — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.” – 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
- “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
- “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, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” – Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley Quotes From Brave New World
- “I am I, and I wish I weren’t.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “Ending is better than mending.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “Can you say something about nothing?” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “But every one belongs to every one else” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “A love of nature keeps no factories busy.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “A man can smile and smile and be a villain.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “Isn’t there something in living dangerously?” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “What would it be like if I were free—not enslaved by my conditioning.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “It is natural to believe in God when you’re alone– quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “They’re old; they’re about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now. But God doesn’t change. Men do though” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “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
- “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, Brave New World
- “One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make a choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “Our world is not the same as Othello’s world. You can’t make flivvers without steel—and you can’t make tragedies without social instability. The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
- “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, Brave New World
- “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, Brave New World
- “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, Brave New World
Famous Aldous Huxley Books
Most famous for his 1959 novel Brave New World. Huxley wrote more than fifty books, both novels and non-fiction works- ranging from novels, essay collections, and poetry. He was nominated nine times for the Nobel prize in literature and was elected Companion of Literature in 1962 by the Royal Society of Literature.
Brave New World, recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award of Merit, has been adapted several times for television, radio, and film.
- Brave New World
- The Doors Of Perception
- Island
- Point Counter Point
- The Art Of Seeing
- The Perrenial Philosophy
- Heaven And Hell
- The Devils of Loudun
- Ends And Means
- The Divine WIthin
These best Aldous Huxley quotes also cover Aldous Huxley quotes on death, Aldous Huxley quotes about the future, Aldous Huxley quotes about kindness, the doors of perception Aldous Huxley quotes, heaven and hell Aldous Huxley quotes, and perennial philosophy Aldous Huxley quotes.
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Motivational And Inspirational Quotes
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Motivational And Inspirational Quotes