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
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Conviction, Attitude, Business
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
—Aldous Huxley
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 democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: War
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
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Genius
The proper study of mankind is books.
—Aldous Huxley
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: War, General, Light, Character, Win, Good, Act
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Excuses
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Habits, Habit
Every man’s memory is his private literature.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Memories, Literature, Memory
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
Topics: Ignorance, Growth
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
Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions.
—Aldous Huxley
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
Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Consistency, Change
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
—Aldous Huxley
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Professionalism, Experts
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
We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Scientists, Science
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Religion
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.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Friendship
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
Topics: Realism
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
Topics: Charm
Science has “explained” nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Science
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: City Life, Cities
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Travel
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
The spiritual journey does not consist in 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 the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one’s self.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Ignorance, Growth, Spiritual, God, Life, New, Spirit, Journeys
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
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