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
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: Reading, Books
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Experts, Professionalism
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
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
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
Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons—that’s philosophy.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Philosophy
It had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Wine
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
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Travel
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
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
I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Fame
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
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, Win, Character, Act, War, General
There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world’s sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Desires
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
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Genius
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Habits, Habit
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Sex, Learn, Wisdom
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
A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.
—Aldous Huxley
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Experience
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: World, Fun, One liners
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Thought, Truth, Reason
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Morals, Morality
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Tyranny
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
—Aldous Huxley
Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Intellectuals, Intelligence
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
Every man’s memory is his private literature.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Memory, Memories, Literature
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