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, England, 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-Gita (1944,) and Vedanta 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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Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.
—Aldous Huxley
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the byproduct of other activities.
—Aldous Huxley
There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterward, when you’ve worked on your own corner.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Confidence, Self-reliance, Helping, Progress, Self-Control, Discipline, Self-improvement
The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Morality, Morals
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
—Aldous Huxley
Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Goodness
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
—Aldous Huxley
Experience teaches only the teachable.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Experience
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Religion
Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals
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
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
Facts don’t cease to exist because they are ignored.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Wisdom, Truth, Facts, Information
Happiness is something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Happiness
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Solitude
Sleep is the most blessed and blessing of all natural graces.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Sleep, Relaxation
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: Adversity, Intelligence
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
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
—Aldous Huxley
Every man’s memory is his private literature.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Memory, Literature
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
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Individuality
Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Thoughts, Thought, Thinking
Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as for the body.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Change, Consistency
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
—Aldous Huxley
Topics: Genius
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