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
Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment…. The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Reading
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means of going backward.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Technology
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the byproduct of other activities.
—Aldous Huxley
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Children
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: Simple Living, Intelligence, Simplicity
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance.We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Ignorance
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
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
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Philosophy
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
—Aldous Huxley
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
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
Dream in a pragmatic way.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Dreams
I can sympathize with people’s pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Happiness
The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Nations, Nation, Nationalism, Nationality
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Silence, Music
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Reason, Thought, Truth
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Walking
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Travel
Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Thinking, Thought, Thoughts
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
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: Education, Reading
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
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
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
A life-worshipper’s philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Life, Lust For
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Bureaucracy
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
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
—Aldous Huxley
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Learn, Wisdom, Sex
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