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
When life appears to be working against you, when your luck is down, when the supposedly wrong people show up, or when you slip up and return to old, self-defeating habits, recognize the signs that you’re out of harmony with intention.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Luck
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
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
Topics: Facts
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
—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
Now, a corpse, poor thing, is an untouchable and the process of decay is, of all pieces of bad manners, the vulgarest imaginable. For a corpse is, by definition, a person absolutely devoid of savoir vivre.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Death
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Civilization, Passion
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, Intelligence, Simple Living
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
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
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Identity
If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution—then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Drugs
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
Topics: Books, Reading
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
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
—Aldous Huxley
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means of going backward.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Technology
It is because we don’t know who we are, because we are unaware that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, that we behave in the generally silly, the often insane, the sometimes criminal ways that are so characteristically human. We are saved, we are liberated and enlightened, by perceiving the hitherto unperceived good that is already within us, by returning to our eternal ground and remaining where, without knowing it, we have always been.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Good, Light, War, Act, Character, Win, General
The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Government
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Art
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: Dying, Death
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
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Work
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
Topics: Books
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
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Thought, Truth, Reason
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
To associate with other like-minded people in small, purposeful groups is for the great majority of men and women a source of profound psychological satisfaction. Exclusiveness will add to the pleasure of being several, but at one; and secrecy will intensify it almost to ecstasy.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Society
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Morals, Morality
I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Advertising
If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay, in solid cash, the tribute which Philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Art, Hypocrisy
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 worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
—Aldous Huxley
The proper study of mankind is books.
—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
Topics: Progress
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Walking
Sleep is the most blessed and blessing of all natural graces.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Sleep, Relaxation
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Talent
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Silence, Music
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Fanaticism
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: One liners, Fun, World
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
E. M. Forster English Novelist
Douglas Adams British Author
Corrie Ten Boom Dutch Jewish Humanist
Desiderius Erasmus Dutch Humanist, Scholar
G. K. Chesterton English Journalist
Robert Anton Wilson American Polymath
Thomas Love Peacock English Satirist
J. G. Ballard English Novelist
Percy Bysshe Shelley English Poet
George Harrison English Singer