Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894–1963) was an English novelist, poet, literary critic, philosopher, and essayist. Among the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, he explored crucial questions of science, religion, and philosophy.
Born in Godalming, Surrey, Huxley was the grandson of T. H. Huxley, the famous proponent of Darwinism when it was first finding acceptance.
Aldous attended Eton College and specialized in biology, intending to become a doctor, but he contracted keratitis and soon was almost blind. However, he learned to read Braille and continued his studies under tutors. When one eye recovered enough so that he could read with a magnifying glass, he turned to English literature and philosophy at Oxford, earning a degree in 1915. He developed a close friendship with the writer D. H. Lawrence—both lived in Italy in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Lawrence was a strong influence on Huxley, particularly in his mistrust of intellect and trust in vital promptings.
Skeptical, brilliant portraits of a decadent society characterized Huxley’s early period. After writing the novels Crome Yellow (1921,) Antic Hay (1923,) Point Counter Point (1928,) Brave New World (1932) and Eyeless in Gaza (1936,) he moved to California in 1937. There, he met the British novelist Christopher Isherwood and become captivated by Eastern religious mysticism. His study of Hindu wisdom resulted in a translation, with Swami Prabhavananda, of the Bhagavad Gītā (1944,) and Vedānta for the Western World (1945.) In 1953, he experimented with psychedelic drugs, writing of his experiences in The Doors of Perception (1954.)
Huxley’s most successful later work was The Devils of Loudon (1952,) which dealt with the hysteria that swept a French Ursuline convent in the 17th century and the martyrdom of a priest.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Aldous Huxley
Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Intellectuals, Intelligence
Sleep is the most blessed and blessing of all natural graces.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Sleep, Relaxation
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Attitude, Business, Conviction
Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are – there we are in the Golden Future
—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
Topics: Attention
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
Experience teaches only the teachable.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Experience
A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.
—Aldous Huxley
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Philosophy
Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
—Aldous Huxley
The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces and inspirations he has received can make itself felt to other human beings in the white spaces, so to speak, between the lines of his verse. This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in art and nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Poetry
The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.
—Aldous Huxley
The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Charm
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes—ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Heroism, Heroes, Heroes/Heroism
Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Wealth
Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow’s misdeeds out of yesterday’s miscreeds?
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Drugs
Pure Spirit, one hundred degrees proof—that’s a drink that only the most hardened contemplation-guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Spirit, Spirituality
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
Topics: Murder
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
Topics: Simplicity, Simple Living, Intelligence
A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Cities, City Life
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
Topics: Forgiveness
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Music, Silence
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
Topics: Correction, Reform
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
Topics: Wishes
Facts don’t cease to exist because they are ignored.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Information, Truth, Facts, Wisdom
Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the “higher life.”
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Intelligence, Adversity, Miscellaneous
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Bureaucracy
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Father, Family, Children, Fathers
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Freedom, Eating
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
Topics: Vice, Virtue
At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.
—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
Topics: Prophecy, Vision
If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Cats
The traveler’s-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Humanity
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Beauty
Faith may be relied upon to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Faith, Belief
Modern man’s besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Reason, Instincts, Intuition
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Politics, Ideals, Politicians
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
Topics: Truth
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Death, Dying
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