Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Aldous Huxley (English Humanist)

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

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Equality

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

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

Facts don’t cease to exist because they are ignored.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Facts, Truth, Wisdom, Information

The proper study of mankind is books.
—Aldous Huxley

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
—Aldous Huxley

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Genius

Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Goodness

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
—Aldous Huxley

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Silence

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

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Thoughts, Thought

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

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Bureaucracy

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

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

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

The horror no less than the charm of real life consists precisely in the recurrent actualization of the inconceivable.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Charm

Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Fanaticism

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

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

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Prejudice

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

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance.We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Ignorance

Every person who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make life full, significant, and interesting.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Reading, Education

Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Change, Consistency

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

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: Growth, Ignorance

The religions whose theology is least preoccupied with events in time and most concerned with eternity, have been consistently less violent and more humane in political practice. Unlike early Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism (all obsessed with time) Hinduism and Buddhism have never been persecuting faiths, have preached almost no holy wars and have refrained from that proselytizing religious imperialism which has gone hand in hand with political and economic oppression of colored people.
—Aldous Huxley

But a priest’s life is not supposed to be well-rounded; it is supposed to be one-pointed—a compass, not a weathercock.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Religion, Churches

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