Aldous Huxley Quotes

450 Sourced Quotes

The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.

Aldous Huxley
Nothing is more dreadful than a cold, unimpassioned indulgence. And love infallibly becomes cold and unimpassioned when it is too lightly made.

Aldous Huxley
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.

Aldous Huxley
One right-thinking man thinks like all other right-thinking men of his time—that is to say, in most cases, like some wrong-thinking man of another time.

Aldous Huxley
Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.

Aldous Huxley
In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled.

Aldous Huxley
In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.

Aldous Huxley
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
Given a fair chance, human beings can govern themselves, and govern themselves better

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
Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.

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

Aldous Huxley
Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising.

Aldous Huxley
It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.

Aldous Huxley
The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.

Aldous Huxley
And what strange voices they have! Sometimes like the complaining of small children; sometimes like the noise of lambs...

Aldous Huxley
All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.

Aldous Huxley
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

Aldous Huxley
Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.

Aldous Huxley
In any race between human numbers and natural resources, time is against us.

Aldous Huxley
Proportion... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.

Aldous Huxley
Wherever we turn we find that the real obstacles to peace are human will and feeling, human convictions, prejudices, opinions. If we want to get rid of war we must get rid first of all of its psychological causes. Only when this has been done will the rulers of the nations even desire to get rid of the economic and political causes.

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

Aldous Huxley
If you look up 'Intelligence' in the new volumes of the Encyclopeadia Britannica, you'll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather's a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military.

Aldous Huxley
The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg — eight ninths below the water line, one ninth above.

Aldous Huxley