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

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

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

Classic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Forgiveness, Regret, Repentance, Remorse

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

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

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

Every man’s memory is his private literature.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Memories, Memory, Literature

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

I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Fame

Dream in a pragmatic way.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Dreams

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Travel

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Habits, Habit

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

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: Growth, Journeys, Ignorance, God, New, Life, Spirit, Spiritual

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Ideals, Politics, Politicians

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

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Thinking, Thought, Thoughts

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

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

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
—Aldous Huxley

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Excuses

One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Organization

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

We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Tragedy

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: Hypocrisy, Art

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

Faith may be relied upon to produce sustained action and, more rarely, sustained contemplation.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Belief, Faith

The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Government

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Talent

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

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