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Aldous Huxley Quotes
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Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer, novelist, philosopher, and prominent member of the Huxley family. He graduated from Balliol College at the University of Oxford with a first-class honours in English literature.

The author of nearly fifty books, he was best known for his novels including Brave New World, set in a dystopian future; for non-fiction works, such as The Doors of Perception, which recalls experiences when taking a psychedelic drug; and a wide-ranging output of essays. Early in his career Huxley edited the magazine Oxford Poetry and published short stories and poetry. Mid career and later, he published travel writing, film stories, and scripts. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. In 1962, a year before his death, he was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.

Huxley was a humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism, in particular universalism. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in seven different years.

✵ 26. July 1894 – 22. November 1963   •   Other names Aldous L. Huxley, Aldous Leonard Huxley
Aldous Huxley photo
Aldous Huxley: 290   quotes 34   likes

Aldous Huxley Quotes

“One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

Truth

“Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?”

Aldous Huxley book Time Must Have a Stop

Time Must Have a Stop (1944)

Death

“In the days before machinery men and women who wanted to amuse themselves were compelled, in their humble way, to be artists. Now they sit still and permit professionals to entertain them by the aid of machinery. It is difficult to believe that general artistic culture can flourish in this atmosphere of passivity.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

Women , Men , Way

“The spark within is akin to the Divine Ground. By identifying ourselves with the first we can come to unitive knowledge of the second. These empirical facts of the spiritual life have been variously rationalized in terms of the theologies of the various religions. The Hindus categorically affirm that Thou art That — that the indwelling Atman is the same as Brahman. For orthodox Christianity there is not an identity between the spark and God. Union of the human spirit with God takes place — union so complete that the word deification is applied to it; but it is not the union of identical substances. According to Christian theology, the saint is “deified,” not because Atman is Brahman, but because God has assimilated the purified human spirit in to the divine substance by an act of grace. Islamic theology seems to make a similar distinction. The Sufi, Mansur, was executed for giving to the words “union” and “deification” the literal meaning which they bear in the Hindu tradition. For our present purposes, however, the significant fact is that these words are actually used by Christians and Mohammedans to describe the empirical facts of metaphysical realization by means of direct, super-rational intuition.”

Aldous Huxley

Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (1944)

Life , God , Religion , Art

“How significant is the enormous heightening, under mescalin, of the perception of color! … Man's highly developed color sense is a biological luxury—inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal. … Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind. It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of things are primary.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

describing his experiment with mescaline, pp. 26-27
The Doors of Perception (1954)

Color , Sense , Time , Animals

“Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalist system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort, from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of Geneva and New England.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

War

“I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.”

Aldous Huxley

"Sermons in Cats"
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)

“Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.”

Aldous Huxley

No reliable source makes this quote disputed.
Unattributed

World , Learning , Forgetting

“Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3 (p. 19)

Democracy

“No Dutch, no English, and therefore no planters, no coolie labour, no cash crops, no systematic exhaustion of our soil. Also no whisky, no Calvinism, no syphilis, no foreign administrators. We were left to go our own way and take responsibility for our own affairs.”

Aldous Huxley book Island

Island (1962)

Way

“Suso has even left a diagrammatic picture of the relations subsisting between Godhead, triune God and creatures. In this very curious and interesting drawing a chain of manifestation connects the mysterious symbol of the Divine Ground with the three Persons of the Trinity, and the Trinity in turn is connected in a descending scale with angels and human beings. These last, as the drawing vividly shows, may make one of two choices. They can either live the life of the outer man, the life of the separative selfhood; in which case they are lost (for, in the words of the Theologia Germanica, “nothing burns in hell but the self”). Or else they can identify themselves with the inner man, in which case it becomes possible for them, as Suso shows, to ascend again, through unitive knowledge, to the Trinity and even, beyond the Trinity, to the ultimate Unity of the Divine Ground.”

Aldous Huxley

Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (1944)

Life , God , Angels , Hell

“From the internal reality, by which I means the totality of psychological experiences, it [science] actually separates us. Art, for example, deals with many more aspects of this internal reality than does science, which confines itself deliberately and by convention to the study of one very limited class of experiences—the experiences of sense.”

Aldous Huxley

“One and Many,” p. 5–6
Do What You Will (1928)

Art , Reality , Sense , Study

“Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3 (p. 20)

Life , Help , Happiness

“Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.”

Aldous Huxley

" Note on Dogma http://books.google.com/books?id=gcfPAAAAMAAJ&q="Those+who+believe+that+they+are+exclusively+in+the+right+are+generally+those+who+achieve+something""
Proper Studies (1927)

“Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

Art , Dead

“At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.
First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness — the world of things and animals and men and even gods — is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.
Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.
Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.
Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so to come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.”

Aldous Huxley

Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (1944)

Life , Men , God , World

“Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 1 (p. 14)

War , Country

“The Quaestor turned back the pages until he found himself among the Pensées. “We are not satisfied,” he read, “with the life we have in ourselves and our own being; we want to live an imaginary life in other people’s idea of us. Hence all our efforts are directed to seeming what we are not. We labor incessantly to preserve and embellish this imaginary being, and neglect that which is really ours.” The Quaestor put down the book, … and ruefully reflected that all his own troubles had arisen from this desire to seem what in fact he was not. To seem a man of action, when in fact he was a contemplative; to seem a politician, when nature had made him an introspective psychologist; to seem a wit, which God had intended him for a sage.”

Aldous Huxley

“Variations on a Philosopher” in Themes and Variations (1943), p. 2

Life , God , People , Books

“Our conviction that the world is meaningless is due in part to the fact (discussed in a later paragraph) that the philosophy of meaningless lends itself very effectively to furthering the ends of political and erotic passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error - the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning has deliberately been excluded, with ultimate reality.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

World , Error , Reality , Passion

“Why did it occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And conversely why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness.”

Aldous Huxley

“One and Many,” p. 12
Do What You Will (1928)

God , World , Question , Time

“Of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently — though as little of one as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World

Source: Brave New World (1932), Ch. 1

Intelligence , Idea , Evil , Happiness

“Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 5 (p. 43)

“The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as where? — how far? — how situated in relation to what? In the mescaline experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

World , Question , Problem , Time

“Several excuses are always less convincing than one.”

Aldous Huxley book Point Counter Point

Source: Point Counter Point (1928), Ch. 1

“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

Wanted, A New Pleasure
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)

Life , Pleasure , World , Beauty

“Jehovah, Allah, the Trinity, Jesus, Buddha, are names for a great variety of human virtues, human mystical experiences, human remorses, human compensatory fantasies, human terrors, human cruelties. If all men were alike, all the world would worship the same God.”

Aldous Huxley

“One and Many,” p. 3
Do What You Will (1928)

Men , God , World

“Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.”

Aldous Huxley

Part IV: America, London http://books.google.com/books?lr=&id=iy0SkXPxsF8C&q=%22Proverbs+are+always+platitudes+until+you+have+personally+experienced+the+truth+of+them%22&pg=PA207#v=onepage, Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey, (1926)

Truth , Personality

“What the cinema can do better than literature or the spoken drama is to be fantastic.”

Aldous Huxley

"Where are the Movies Moving?" in Essays Old and New (1926)

Literature

“The film concludes with … the most nauseatingly luscious, the most penetratingly vulgar mammy song that it has ever been my lot to hear. My flesh crept as the loud speaker poured out those sodden words, the greasy, sagging melody. I felt ashamed of myself for listening to such things, for even being a member of the species to which such things are addressed.”

Aldous Huxley

“Silence is Golden,” p. 62
Do What You Will (1928)

“Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.”

Aldous Huxley

"The Substitutes for Religion, The Religion of Sex"
Proper Studies (1927)

Secret

“In the course of evolution nature has gone to endless trouble to see that every individual is unlike every other individual.… Physically and mentally, each one of us is unique. Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man’s biological nature.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3 (p. 21)

Nature

“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 rumour, and survival a thing beyond the bounds of possibility.”

Aldous Huxley

Themes and Variations (1950)

Death , Hell , Knowledge

““What about spatial relationships?” the investigator inquired, as I was looking at the books. It was difficult to answer. True, the perspective looked rather odd, and the walls of the room no longer seemed to meet in right angles. But these were not the really important facts. The really important facts were that spatial relationships had ceased to matter very much and that my mind was perceiving the world in terms of other than spatial categories. At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as Where?—How far?—How situated in relation to what? In the mescalin experience the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its Perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern. I saw the books, but was not at all concerned with their positions in space. What I noticed, what impressed itself upon my mind was the fact that all of them glowed with living light and that in some the glory was more manifest than in others. In this context position and the three dimensions were beside the point. Not, of course, that the category of space had been abolished. When I got up and walked about, I could do so quite normally, without misjudging the whereabouts of objects. Space was still there; but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

describing his experiment with mescaline, pp. 19-20
Source: The Doors of Perception (1954)

Books , World , Question , Problem

“Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 11 (p. 106)

Children , Education , Way , Falseness

“History teaches us that war is not inevitable. Once again, it is for us to choose whether we use war or some other method of settling the ordinary and unavoidable conflicts between groups of men.”

Aldous Huxley

What Are You Going To Do About It? The case for constructive peace (1936)

Men , War , History

“The masses on the contrary, have just reached the point where the ancestors of today's scientists were standing two generations back. They are convinced that the scientific picture of an arbitrary abstraction from reality is a picture of reality as a whole and that therefore the world is without meaning or value. But nobody likes living in such a world. To satisfy their hunger for meaning and value, they turn to such doctrines as nationalism, fascism and revolutionary communism. Philosophically and scientifically, these doctrines are absurd; but for the masses in every community, they have this great merit: they attribute the meaning and value that have been taken away from the world as a whole to the particular part of the world in which the believers happen to be living.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

Hunger , World , Communication , Reality

“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

Understanding

“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

Page 191
The Doors of Perception (1954)

Understanding

“Ours is an industrial civilization, in which no society can prosper unless it possesses an elite of highly trained scientists and a considerable army of engineers and technicians. The possession and wide dissemination of a great deal of correct, specialized knowledge has become a prime condition of national survival. In the United States, during the last twenty or thirty years, this fact seems to have been forgotten. Professional educationists have taken John Dewey's theories of ‘learning through doing’ and of ‘education as life adjustment,’ and have applied them in such a way that, in many American schools, there is now doing without learning, along with courses in adjustment to everything except the basic twentieth-century fact that we live in a world where ignorance of science and its methods is the surest, shortest road to national disaster. During the past half century every other nation has made great efforts to impart more knowledge to more young people. In the United States professional educationists have chosen the opposite course.”

Aldous Huxley

"Knowledge and Understanding", in Vedanta and the West (May-June 1956); later in Collected Essays (1958)

Life , People , World , Education

“However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 3 (p. 24)

Men

“If good music has charms to soothe the savage breast, bad music has no less powerful spells for filling the mildest breast with rage, the happiest with horror and disgust. Oh, those mammy songs, those love longings, those loud hilarities! How was it possible that human emotions intrinsically decent could be so ignobly parodied.”

Aldous Huxley

“Silence is Golden,” p. 59
Do What You Will (1928)

Love , Music , Rage

“And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

Feeling , Madness

“We may not appreciate the fact; but a fact nevertheless it remains: we are living in a Golden Age, the most gilded Golden Age of human history — not only of past history, but of future history. For, as Sir Charles Darwin and many others before him have pointed out, we are living like drunken sailors, like the irresponsible heirs of a millionaire uncle. At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on? Estimates vary. But all are agreed that within a few centuries or at most a few millennia, Man will have run through his capital and will be compelled to live, for the remaining nine thousand nine hundred and seventy or eighty centuries of his career as Homo sapiens, strictly on income. Sir Charles is of the opinion that Man will successfully make the transition from rich ores to poor ores and even sea water, from coal, oil, uranium and thorium to solar energy and alcohol derived from plants. About as much energy as is now available can be derived from the new sources — but with a far greater expense in man hours, a much larger capital investment in machinery. And the same holds true of the raw materials on which industrial civilization depends. By doing a great deal more work than they are doing now, men will contrive to extract the diluted dregs of the planet’s metallic wealth or will fabricate non-metallic substitutes for the elements they have completely used up. In such an event, some human beings will still live fairly well, but not in the style to which we, the squanderers of planetary capital, are accustomed.”

Aldous Huxley

"Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" in Adonis and the Alphabet (1956); later in Collected Essays (1959), p. 293

Men , Alcohol , Age , History

“For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was an admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever. Similar tactics had been adopted during the eighteenth century and for the same reasons… The men of the new Enlightenment, which occurred in the middle years of the nineteenth century, once again used meaninglessness as a weapon against the reactionaries. The Victorian passion for respectability was, however, so great that, during the period when they were formulated, neither Positivism nor Darwinism was used as a justification for sexual indulgence.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

Men , People , World , Way

“I strongly suspect that most of the great knowers of Suchness paid very little attention to art.… (To a person whose transfigured and transfiguring mind can see the All in every this, the first-rateness or tenth-rateness of even a religious painting will be a matter of the most sovereign indifference.) Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

The Doors of Perception (1954)

Art , Painting , Personality , Dead

“How shall we define a god? Expressed in psychological terms (which are primary-there is no getting behind them) a god is something that gives us the peculiar kind of feeling which Professor Otto has called "numinous". Numinous feelings are the original god-stuff from which the theory-making mind extracts the individualised gods of the pantheon.”

Aldous Huxley

"Meditation on the Moon"
Music at Night and Other Essays (1931)

God , Feeling

“It often happens that reforms merely have the effect of transferring the undesirable tendencies of individuals from one channel to another channel. An old outlet for some particular wickedness is closed; but a new outlet is opened. The wickedness is not abolished; it is merely provided with a different set of opportunities for self-expression.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)