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.
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Happiness is something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Happiness
People will insist on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Desires
Experience teaches only the teachable.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Experience
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance.We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Ignorance
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Genius
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, Nationality, Nationalism
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
The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Reform, Correction
It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
—Aldous Huxley
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
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Body, Man, Mankind
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
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes—ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Heroism, Heroes/Heroism, Heroes
Hope for a miracle. But don’t depend on one.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Experience
Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons—that’s philosophy.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Philosophy
Where beauty is worshipped for beauty’s sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Beauty
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
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
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Actors, Acting
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
Sleep is the most blessed and blessing of all natural graces.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Relaxation, Sleep
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
Dream in a pragmatic way.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Dreams
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 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 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: Churches, Religion
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
—Aldous Huxley
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Morals, Morality
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Silence, Music
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means of going backward.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Technology
Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Hypocrisy
Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Pleasure
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, the Caesars and Napoleons will arise to make them miserable.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Tyranny
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
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hall-mark of true science.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Experts, Professionalism
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
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
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
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