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. Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford with an undergraduate degree in English literature. This Aldous Huxley quotes about love, life, nature will motivate you.
Best Aldous Huxley Quotes
- “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 deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without evidence.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.” ~ 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
-
“Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel light 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 is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” ~ Aldous Huxley Quotes
- “Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.” ~ 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
-
“Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.” ~ 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
-
“To be a fool at the right time is also an art.” ~ 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
- “Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.” ~ 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 Quotes
- “If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.” ~ Aldous Huxley
-
“An intellectual is a person who’s found one thing that’s more interesting than sex.” ~ 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 ceiling reached becomes a floor.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.” ~ 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
-
“The more you know, the more you see.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “which is better – to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?” ~ 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 one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.” ~ 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
-
“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity.” ~ 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
- “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 a 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
-
“The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the clearest 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 propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” ~ 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
- “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 Quotes
-
“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.” ~ 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
- “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 unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.” ~ 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
- “Medical science is making such remarkable progress that soon none of us will be well.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.” ~ 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
- “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 of the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning oneself and life and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is coming to one?s self.” ~ Aldous Huxley Quotes
-
“We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.” ~ 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
-
“Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.” ~ 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
- “We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy, we only look.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.” ~ 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 afterward when you have worked on your own corner.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.” ~ 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
-
“So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.” ~ 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
- “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.” ~ Aldous Huxley
- “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.” ~ Aldous Huxley
