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

Experience teaches only the teachable.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Experience

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

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Speed, Pleasure, Haste

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

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: One liners, Fun, World

There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Sacrifice

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom, Proverbs, Quotations

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

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

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 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

Men make use of their illnesses at least as much as they are made use of by them.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Health

Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies. Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Facts

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 ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.
—Aldous Huxley

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: Lust For, Life

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: Instincts, Reason, Intuition

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means of going backward.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Technology

The proper study of mankind is books.
—Aldous Huxley

The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Vision, Prophecy

The condition of being forgiven is self-abandonment. The proud man prefers self-reproach, however painful—because the reproached self isn’t abandoned; it remains intact.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Forgiveness

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

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: Miscellaneous, Intelligence, Adversity

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Reason, Truth, Thought

We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Scientists, Science

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

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

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Walking

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

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